Yahoo IQ Trivia Brand Identity Design

Yahoo! Games
Mini Crossword

Brand identity and game card design for Yahoo Mini Crossword — a new daily word game launching on the Yahoo Games platform, designed to feel instantly recognizable as a Yahoo game with a playful, crossword-first identity.

Yahoo! Games Mini Crossword

Brand Identity & Game Card

Yahoo was launching a new Mini Crossword game and needed a full visual identity to make it feel unmistakably Yahoo. The brief was clear: design a logo, game card, and promotional assets that feel classy and polished with a Yahoo wink. Unlike IQ Trivia, the visual style had already been established, so the focus was on leaning into that system rather than exploring new directions from scratch.

Client: Yahoo
Role: Senior Illustrator & Visual Designer
Project: Yahoo Mini Crossword
Deliverables: Logo, game card system, promotional assets
Timeline: 2-week sprint

The Process

Discover & Align

With the Yahoo Games visual language already established from IQ Trivia, the research phase focused less on exploration and more on understanding what makes Mini Crossword distinct within the family. Reviewed the existing game card system, audited how competitors position their crossword brands, and aligned with the PRD to identify the key design challenge: how do you instantly communicate "this is a crossword" and "this is faster than a full crossword" at the same time?

Going Wide

Because the style system was already in place, the exploration phase focused on how to integrate the crossword grid mechanic directly into the logo and game card treatment. Explored directions where the crossword grid became the hero visual, letterforms sat inside crossword tiles, and the pencil became a supporting character. The goal was to make the game mechanic readable at a glance, the same way a deck of cards instantly signals a card game.

Converge & Polish

The client aligned on a direction that put the crossword grid front and center, with the game title letters sitting inside crossword tiles to make the mechanic immediately clear. A pencil illustration was introduced as a supporting character, adding personality without overcomplicating the composition. All assets were refined and adapted across four sizes: 600x400, 400x600, 300x400, and 120x120, ensuring the design held together from a full game card down to a near app-icon scale.

Game Page Card

The game page card is the cover art for Yahoo Mini Crossword. It needed to communicate what the game is, that it is faster and lighter than a full crossword, and that it is a Yahoo game — all within a tight visual space.

The crossword grid bleeds off the edges of the card, giving it energy and scale without cluttering the center. The pencil illustration adds a playful, tactile quality that signals this is a word game you play with your hands. Every element was pressure-tested against one question: does this instantly read as a quick, fun crossword game?

The card adapts across three sizes: 600x400, 300x400, and 120x120, with each size stripping elements back to their most essential form to maintain legibility and impact at smaller scales.