Talent Tree: Senior Creative Director, Brand & Creative

Talent Tree is a blog series about the talented people behind everything we create. Jens, a creative director, shares how he approaches the branding, trailers, and experiences that introduce players to Blizzard's worlds, and how he helps ideas take shape from their first spark to their final form.

Tell us about your background. Where did you get your start, and what led you to Blizzard?

Some people know early on exactly what they want to do. For me, all I knew was that I love making things, I love building things, and I love crafting things.

I started in design and quickly moved into art direction, covering everything from physical experiences and real-life builds to working for different brands and design studios.

When I joined Blizzard six years ago, I felt so at home immediately, even though I walked in with a beginner's mindset despite having 15 years of experience. Stepping in, I really put emphasis on not thinking that I had all the answers until I got to know all of the people that I now work with and could learn what kind of story we're trying to tell, what kind of world we're trying to build.

Can you tell us more about your role as a creative director?

At Blizzard, I work on how a game feels before you even play it. Before you press start, you've already had dozens of small interactions with it: the logo, the trailer, a booth at BlizzCon, a broadcast that cuts through on a website. Each one is a promise about what's inside. My job is making sure that promise is true, and that it hits.

We're all building the same world. My part is crafting the door you walk through to get in. The same blueprint, same materials, same obsession with detail, just translated into a different format. That comes from a fundamental belief that the best brand work comes from playing the game, finding what's true about the experience, and then amplifying it.

If we do our job right, anything we make feels like it's coming from inside the world, not placed on top or wrapped around it. Over the years, that's meant everything from brand work that lives in-game like skins and UI, to the Overwatch Spotlight set and broadcast designs, and the STARCRAFT Join the Dominion experience at BlizzCon this year.

How do you help an idea become something real?

The first spark of an idea is maybe 10% of it becoming real. Once you have it, the real work is crafting and protecting that idea all the way through production.

An idea goes through a lot of gates before it reaches its final state: budgets, schedules, feedback, a hundred small decisions that can each pull it slightly off course. Creative direction, to me, is knowing how to let the idea evolve through all of that without losing the thing that made it worth chasing in the first place. Yes, it's having ideas. But more importantly, it's carrying them through.

How do you approach a new brief or project? What questions do you ask yourself?

Whenever something new lands on my desk, the first thing I think about is: what do we want this to feel like? What's the emotion that we want to land? Because before we get into storytelling or gameplay, or even before your brain has processed what your eyeballs are taking in, there's an emotion.

Is it suspense? Is it joy? Is it dread (if we're in the world of Diablo)? It can be a combination of all of them, but I look at the emotion as the guide for, "Okay, what do we want to do here?" That emotion acts as a lighthouse in that we can always look back to it and ask, "Is this feeling this way?"

How do you balance the needs of a project with creative impulse and artistic freedom?

I love doing new things. Even when there's a playbook, even if it's a minor update we've done dozens of times, some part of me is always asking, "Yeah, but what if we did it a new way?"

Sometimes you have to reel that in, and sometimes there's room to let it roam. There's a right time to let your dog off the leash, so to speak. You don't do it on a busy street. But in an open field, where it's safe, what better thing to do than unclip it and let the dog run? That's how I think about creative freedom: knowing which situation you're in.

Is there a project you've worked on that you're particularly proud of?

The "long table" for Blizzard's 35-year anniversary. The idea behind the table was a big family dinner, like a reunion, and the joy of sitting down together reminiscing and feeling nostalgia. Sharing laughs but also with pride of, "Look how far we've come." And then also a big dose of excitement for the future. That was really the story that we wanted to tell.

We have a physical archive at Blizzard that is also incredibly unique. The Archives team are so talented, and they have so many amazing things in there. Every physical object in that video is 100% real, we didn't use any CGI. We built that whole thing.

My point of view was that the story here is what is on the table, so we should just let the camera be completely still as it moves over the table. We're not cutting in and out of things, we're not using any fancy tricks. We're just letting the history and the legacy of Blizzard speak for itself, and then point steadily towards the future, because there is so much ahead that we are so excited about.

What was your role in bringing the "long table" together?

I wrote the overall concept, but a piece like this only works through close collaboration. Our producer held the whole thing together, and the Blizzard Archives team was essential from day one. Every item on that table came from them. They know that collection inside and out, and they helped us find the objects that carried the most story. We also had a fantastic production partner that helped us build it.

Seeing the build come together was amazing. We had an enormous camera rig in one of our studios on campus, basically the size of a minivan, that rolled across the table. And there wasn't a single item on that table that wasn't placed deliberately by hand by one of us. Every detail was a decision.

Then we built it all again at BlizzCon. All the actual artifacts, so people could get up close to the full 35-foot stretch of Blizzard's history in the middle of a weekend where we were also showing people what comes next. Watching players lean in and spot something from a game they grew up on was incredible to see live.

Speaking of what comes next, we hear you had a hand in one of the big reveals at BlizzCon this year. What can you tell us about it?

Getting to reveal STARCRAFT at the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony was special. It's a place that means a lot to all of us, and we're building something we're all really excited about: a return to interstellar war from a new point of view, much closer to the action, telling a story only this universe could tell.

We put a lot of thought into the brand: the new logo and the visual language for this next chapter. The question we kept coming back to was how to feel unmistakably true to StarCraft while signaling that something has changed. The tone had to carry both the weight of thirty years of history and a sense that this chapter is its own thing. It was a real honor to get to work on that.

And I have to mention the announce cinematic, made by Blizzard's own Story and Franchise Development team, one of the most talented groups in the business. That piece was where it all came together. In the lead-up to BlizzCon, we also let a "rogue signal" cut through on StarCraft.com and left it to the community to piece together what it meant. Watching the theories build across the threads was one of my favorite parts of the campaign.

What advice would you give to someone interested in the creative field? What can they develop beyond their technical craft?

Always be curious, always have both eyes open. Look at everything. Take the time to reflect on why you like some things and why other things don't speak to you in the same way. That's how you start to develop that muscle of creative instincts.

Watch every movie, listen to every album, read every book. The second you stop doing that, and you don't feed into that curiosity, you're going to gradually lose those instincts.

Last question! Do you have a favorite Blizzard game or character?

Impossible! But I will say this: when I think about what has had the hardest-hitting impact on me, especially growing up, it's the storyline between Raynor and Kerrigan.

I was barely a teenager when I first got to interact with the world in StarCraft. That had such an impact because of the relationship between the two, and the fact that not every story ends with a rainbow. That was something that has stayed with me.