Yahoo! Games IQ Trivia
Brand identity & product illustration for Yahoo IQ Trivia — redesigning the game's entry experience to drive higher play rates and establish a recognizable first-party game presence.
Yahoo! Games IQ Trivia
Rebrand & Redesign
Yahoo IQ Trivia had a low homepage click-through rate. The entry screen read as news content rather than a game, and the game card lacked a distinct brand identity. The brief was twofold: create a new visual identity for the game card, and redesign the entry screen to instantly communicate "this is a game" and motivate users to start playing.
Client: Yahoo
Role: Senior Illustrator & Visual Designer
Project: IQ Trivia Entry Screen & Game Card
Deliverables: Brand identity, entry screen system, game card design
Timeline: 2-week sprint
The Process
Discover & Align
Yahoo's IQ Trivia had an identity problem rooted in the homepage entry module. It looked like content, not a game, and that was the priority to fix. Audited Yahoo's design and illustration system, conducted competitor research, and aligned with the PRD to establish clear goals and guardrails. The central creative tension was how to signal "this is a game" instantly without drifting from Yahoo's brand voice.
Going Wide
Explored different directions for the homepage entry module, including Cards, Big Art, Big Text, Trophy, Character-driven, 3D, and Pills, each targeting a different way to communicate game-first framing at a glance. The focus was mobile-first throughout. Simultaneously developed a trivia topic icon system to solve a separate but related problem: users were bouncing because they assumed the quiz covered a single topic they didn't care about.
Converge & Polish
The client aligned on directions that made the question-and-answer dynamic unmistakably clear — a deliberate choice to prioritize clarity over visual novelty. From there, refined the selected concepts into production-ready vectors: finalizing the icon set style, establishing type hierarchy using YA Rounded, introducing a green answer treatment for instant legibility, and designing the game card and 120×120 app icon in parallel. Every detail was pressure-tested against one question: does this read as a game in under a second?
Topic Icon System
One of the core user problems was assumption. Visitors saw the entry screen and assumed the trivia was about a single topic they didn't care about. The icon system was designed to counter that directly: a cohesive set of category icons spanning science, geography, history, movies, and more, each crafted to signal variety at a glance.
The owl was introduced as the game's mascot, anchoring the icon set with a consistent character that reinforced Yahoo's playful but intelligent brand tone. Every icon was designed to hold up at small sizes and remain legible within the tight constraints of the entry screen and game card.
Homepage Entry
The topic icons were applied directly to the homepage entry module, where the design challenge was especially high-stakes. The module had to instantly read as a Yahoo game, not an ad or a news item, and motivate users to click and play without hesitation.
The final direction works for three reasons. The play button signals immediately that this is an interactive game. Yahoo's brand is clearly present without overpowering the experience. And the cards motif gives users a quick read on both the length of the game and the variety of topics they can expect.
Game Page Card
The game page card functions as the cover art for IQ Trivia. Like the homepage module, it needed to communicate what the game is, how long it takes, the range of topics, and that it lives within the Yahoo ecosystem. The difference here was creative latitude and technical constraint working in opposite directions.
The card could be more expressive and playful than the homepage module, but it also had to adapt cleanly across four sizes: 600 × 400, 400 × 600, 300 × 400, and 120 × 120. Designing a system that holds together from a full card down to a near app-icon scale required stripping each element down to its most essential form while keeping the game's personality intact.
