Proxy Intergalactic · Startup · Creative Director · 2015
Fantasy eSports, designed and built end to end.
Proxy was a fantasy eSports site in the DraftKings mold, pointed at people who watch League of Legends and StarCraft the way other people watch football. Small team, several thousand users, and a bakery-themed betting economy that made free-to-play wagering feel like a game instead of a spreadsheet. I served as creative director, designed the brand and the whole site, and wrote the frontend code that shipped it.
The short version
- Betting games named The Bakery and The Oven, because bread was the currency and warmth was the brand. The theme did real work: it kept free-to-play wagering playful instead of seedy.
- Fully responsive in 2015, when that was still a decision rather than a default.
- Designing it and building it turned out to be the same job done twice as well: every layout decision had to survive contact with my own CSS.
01 · The product
Betting mechanics wearing a bakery apron
The economy ran on bread and butter. The Bakery was the traditional betting game, The Oven let a streak bake for consecutive wins, and META asked you to predict picks and bans during character selection. Earnings redeemed for real prizes in the Proxy Shop. None of the mechanics were novel on their own; the work was making them legible to somebody who'd never placed a bet and making the free-to-play loop feel generous rather than extractive.
As creative director on a nimble team, I owned the identity (the mascot included: Plato the Platypus), the marketing site, the logged-in product, and the responsive frontend build. Several thousand users played it.
02 · What shipped
The dashboard, the phone, and the pitch
The logged-in home. Each game is a card with its live state (active bets, streaks, upcoming contests), and the activity rail keeps wins and losses honest. The phone build is the same components, not a separate app.
The pitch page. Play our games, earn bread and butter, redeem prizes. The three-beat structure and the illustrated bakery brand were the whole conversion strategy, and for a startup with no ad budget they held up.