The Organization

The NUEL's Identity

The National University Esports League (NUEL) is a community-focused organization dedicated to student esports. It was founded to provide an opportunity for students to represent their university, meet likeminded gamers on campus and online, and develop their gaming and professional skills.

The NUEL is competitive, inclusive, and integrated. Its main offering is year-long tournaments. Tournaments are tiered by skill and have no eliminations so players of all skills play fair games with a tangible goal throughout the entire season.

University societies are at the core of NUEL’s success and the student experience. NUEL works with student clubs by providing funding, tournaments, and organizational support. Students who enjoy competitive gaming have a developed and engaged community to join at university.

The NUEL has grown from a 30-player TF2 tournament in 2011 to 6500-student platform in 2019. Throughout brand and logo changes, the NUEL’s look and feel has always communicated grassroots focus, inclusiveness, and professionalism.

NUEL was created and is made up of current and ex-students passionate about esports.

Principles

The NUEL’s design is geometric, sharp, and flat. It uses basic shapes and colors to create clearly NUEL-labeled assets. Fonts are sans-serif, light, and high contrast, ensuring elegant content stay readable.

Logomarks tend to be vertical and accompanied by text. This ensures the branding space is flexible for a wide variety of formats and collaborations without losing its look and feel.

The website uses a light, card-based user interface to clearly organize diverse offerings and delineate complex tournament information. Color is used to differentiate cards and as a consistent blue CTA.

General Use

The NUEL has built a signifcant amount of respect within university esports in the UK and abroad. The brand both perpetuates and influences this respect. Clean, consistent designs will reinforce the idea that the NUEL is a premier organization. Messy designs with little quality or content control leaves parties disappointed and uncertain, associating the NUEL with bad content or events. When in doubt, use provided templates, stick to the principles, and let “less is more” guide decision-making.

Resources

NUEL assets and branding are not to be recreated, distorted, edited, or used in inappropriate contexts. This design guideline should be read—at least skimmed in its entirety—before using any of these assets. Use common sense. Respect the brand.

The website maintains clear hierarchy and structure within a given section—all card CTAs link to the same information in different regional tournaments.
Sharp lines, a few strong colors, a delicate balance between grassroots-feeling and professional-looking, clearly about gaming without appealing only to gamers.