Visual Design & Animations

This project began as a fun design competition within the team, where everyone pitched concepts for improving the game loading screen — and my idea was selected to move forward. I transformed the loading screen into an engaging and informative experience that reduced perceived wait times and reinforced brand identity.

The final design combined animations, clear progress indicators, and accessible UI elements to keep players informed and entertained while waiting. Through an iterative process of research, prototyping, and testing, the new loading screen improved usability, strengthened branding, and delivered a more enjoyable player experience across devices. After implementation, the design went through further iterations based on ongoing feedback and performance results.

As part of the Casino design team, I created a range of animated promotional banners for partnerships and campaigns, including collaborations such as Red Bull and time-sensitive countdowns. The visuals and animations were designed in-house, then integrated into an HTML package built by a front-end developer.

My role included producing the animations, preparing assets for development, and occasionally updating campaign details within the package. These banners were designed to be eye-catching yet lightweight — optimised for performance while maintaining brand consistency. Motion was used to draw attention without being intrusive, creating engaging promotional placements that strengthened partner campaigns and improved visibility of time-limited offers.

Across four years at PokerStars, I've produced a wide range of visual and motion design assets — from game icons used in the lobby to animated hero banners shown to millions of players weekly.

Every game requires three asset variants: a square thumbnail (icnSquare), a landscape banner (icnWide), and a portrait poster (icnPoster). The solution is a single Photoshop template that manages all three formats simultaneously — swapping in new artwork updates all three layouts at once, reducing production time per game from hours to minutes.

Game Assets

Three completed game sets — each including the animated hero banner (SVG), wide landscape format, portrait poster, and square thumbnail. The animated SVGs are served directly to the browser and run in the live lobby.

Outcome

The template system is the current production standard for all game icon work at PokerStars — new featured games, promotional tie-ins, and seasonal variations all flow through the same pipeline. The animated SVG format replaced heavier GIF and video formats, reducing lobby load times while maintaining the same visual quality.