What kind of blockheads would give you gifts on their birthday?
To design the page for Minecraft’s 10th anniversary, I was supplied with a lovely, layered Photoshop document of the event’s visual identity, and what else could I do but bring it to life with animation! I can’t do it justice here, but click here take a look at the live version. Credit to the dev team who took my idea and my assets and made them play nice together.
An interactive timeline walks the user through the many key milestones of the past decade.
As part of the walk down Memory Lane, an original, playable build of Minecraft was resurrected and hosted for all to enjoy online. I drew and animated this isometric PC to stir up retro gaming feelings from the time that Minecraft looks to for its style.
To encourage fans to share their personal memories of Minecraft, members of the Stockholm team shared a few of their own. Since these linked out to blog articles, I used the author avatars and pixelated voice bubble to tie the section together with the style of the Minecraft.net blog and articles.
There were a few big announcements that accompanied this event: Minecraft Earth, a Pokemon Go-style AR game, and this year’s streaming Minecon event. These were teased for a few days with some concealed video thumbnails and then the announcements were revealed.
Since heavy traffic was anticipated, we needed to include a few cross-promotions!
And to wrap it all up, a final gift was a free map that led gamers through the history of Minecraft, designed by Marketplace favorites, Blockworks. The map was unavailable when I were putting this page together, so to promote it I put together a banner of weathered map material pulled straight from the game.