As we began exploring what the new look and feel of the League client should be, we wanted to create a visual style that felt like a fantasy game, but avoided the normal fantasy game UI cliches. Parchment and other distressed elements that littered the client in the past look dated relatively quickly, and we wanted to build a flexible visual language that had the ability to scale over multiple features and mediums in the future. In addition to that concern, we wanted to unlock a visual style that didn’t require a dedicated visual artist (or more than one) to be on a team to create a layout. With how fast League grows and iterates, we wanted to avoid some of the problems of the past where resource bottlenecking prevented potentially valuable new features from staying on the shelf for too long and becoming stale.

How it manifested into Hextech

At the same time as our visual exploration phase, the foundations team was working to better define Piltover. They had begun to create some initial directions and concept art, including some showing a technology they dubbed “Hextech.” Thematically, Hextech served as a way of democratizing magic to those who didn’t have those abilities naturally. Items like Jayce’s hammer, Heimerdinger’s gadgets, and Vi’s gloves are all examples of Hextech in action within the game.

This concept of a magic powered machine really fascinated us, and we began to wonder: “What is the client itself was like a Hextech tool that the players could use to interact with the magical world of the game?” This served as the stake in the ground that we built the user interface around, and began to develop some of the basic foundational shapes and colors of this visual language from it.