In 2005-2007 we were working on developing a visual style for Roblox, a construction game engine that gave kids a level of control over its content that was, at least at the time, unprecedented.
Forcing any kind of unified aesthetic onto the Wild West of online gaming was probably impossible, but we wanted to create a style that would distinguish the game from the staid and stodgy style associated with construction toys at the time. Roblox was irreverent, freeform, and action-focused in all the ways that companies like LEGO weren't in 2005. (A few years after Roblox, I'd end up going back to LEGO again to jazz up their dynamic as well, but they have a lot more history behind them and changes that might take a day or two at Roblox took multiple years instead.)
The badges above are the best example of the direction we were pushing: sticking to simple shapes and solid primary colors to sell the kids' construction angle, but with dynamic starbursts, fisheye distortion, and a glossy candylike shine.
Roblox targeted a much lower age group when it was still developing its userbase and functionality. I was really fond of this early style, but as the players and engine matured, it gradually became obsolete.
But we didn't have that kids-color-cartoon direction laid out on day one; those badges and that logo didn't arrive until a full year into the process. This was the first sheet of Roblox logo sketches in March 2006.
The concept process started out in a very responsible and respectable manner, talking about style elements and shape language and the brand message we wanted to get across. These earliest logo sketches looked a lot like the direction Roblox would eventually take in 2017: a construction engine's emphasis on classic geometry, discrete elements on a strong grid, and then little notes of chaos to reflect the dynamism of a game that at the time was mostly about jumping around and blowing stuff up with bazookas. None of these had the iconic brand-statement death punch of the 2017 logo's tilted square "," but they were heading in the same general direction.
The logo concepts didn't appear out of nowhere - we'd started work in 2005 on developing a shape language that would apply across all of Roblox. Whatever combination of classic geometric forms and beveled squares we ended up on, the hope was that players could look at any element and immediately know it was Roblox: not just the logo, but also the figures, the website, the badges, the construction bricks, the UI, and whatever other marketing and products Roblox might create in the future.
The heads in the sketch above were the very earliest examples of shape directions we wanted to explore as starting points. The figures show where we started exploring. We were strongly focused on distinguishing ourselves from existing construction figures, avoiding the flat blocky forms of brands like LEGO and leaning towards barrels and bevels and curves instead.
We put a lot of thought into designing the figures to give ourselves the opportunity to sell LEGO-compatible action figures further down the road. Luckily, this didn't go anywhere. We'd designed these figures for the younger playerbase of 2006, based on the style and proportions of elementary-school toys like Imaginext.
By the time Roblox introduced physical toys in 2017, the player base and avatars had aged up and gone in a different direction, leading to the Robloxian 2.0 and Rthro avatars instead - a much more satisfying all-ages product line.
The final arm in full color shows that I was still thinking in very toyetic terms - molded plastic with LEGO-style opaque prints. That "R" tattoo was from yet another Roblox logo concept that didn't pan out.
(By the time of the Roblox Toys launch, the blind-bag collectible LEGO Minifigures line I'd developed for LEGO in 2004 and which LEGO had finally got around to releasing in 2010 had largely defined the construction figures market. All the construction toy companies sold blind-bag figures now, and so when the Roblox Toys figures hit the shelves, they launched with a blind collectible mechanic as well: plastic "Mystery Boxes" that were ironically much closer to my original blind-box pitch to LEGO than anything LEGO ever released themselves.)
Roblox historians will recognize this figure as 2007's "fusedgirl" mesh. I didn't have a lot of direct input into the 3D modeling - I sent some notes and sketchovers like the ones above up to the modeler in San Mateo, but I wouldn't start doing 3D modeling myself until leading the art team at Tech Deck Live a few months later.
Ultimately, the geometry limitations for the minimum-spec player computers in 2006 were too tight to make this style of figure work. The complex curves required more triangles than the engine could afford to spare, and the low-poly approximation we were able to build in-engine looked wonky as hell. This entire line of development was scrapped, but the work we were doing here influenced a lot of the other design directions over the course of 2006.
Old-school Roblox players will remember these characters showing up all over posters and presentations at Roblox PR and marketing events.
Remember those flat-color textures on the commando arm sketch? We abandoned that idea real quick. In order to further differentiate ourselves from LEGO and other existing contruction figures, we switched to a much denser texture style. Still sticking to bright saturated colors and sculptural hair forms, these figures were designed to fit into the palette of a building-block world but pepper it with splashes of extreme texture.
Look at those 2006 fashion statements! Get ready for these to come back into style as vintage retro nostalgia in 2026.
It was going to be much wilder look than what we'd previously pushed for, and we started thinking about moving the aesthetic away from clean geometry and change focus to creating a feeling of unrestrained individual expression instead.
With that in mind, our next few website mockups had a whole different character than the concepts of a year before.
It was still 2006, so we couldn't get too crazy - we were limited to 2006's rectangular HTML table structures and pre-baked animated GIFs rather than the smooth CSS and vector experiences of today, and Comic Sans was still a standard font for kids' websites. But we tossed in skewed and fisheyed graphics wherever we could, with cartoon-illustrated icons and backgrounds and UI elements. (Look how all those tilted portrait squares foreshadowed the "!")
For the logo, we tossed out the entire previous year's high-concept work on shape language and geometric nuance, and just scribbled in some random graffiti-style letters instead. The first appearance of what would ultimately become the new Roblox logo was on a throwaway sketch for funny user rating icons. The team latched onto it, and I kept redrawing it into the site mockups that followed.
I want to call out the mockup's background image - it was hard to see with all the website elements in front, but I really liked the vertical fisheye and I would go on to use a similar composition for LEGO Universe's Assembly faction banner in 2010.
The team liked the Roblox logo from the concept so much that they lifted the chunky hand-drawn 460-pixel GIF straight out of the mockup and started using it as is. I was mortified! But as a Silicon Valley startup they weren't looking for finished polished perfection, they were in a mode of always jumping to the next iteration and correcting as they went. Very different from what I was used to at LEGO!
Within a few months I convinced them to let me make a cleaned-up vector version that they could use in print and at higher resolutions, but their focus was already on a million other things and they kept using the chunky GIF right up until 2010 (look for the different-shaped hole in the second "O").
With slight modifications and refinements over the years, these versions of the logo survived until Roblox's big 2017 rebranding in preparation for their massive IPO. This was my last contribution to the project as a contract designer, as I was moving on to a series of full-time jobs at Spin Master and LEGO for the next several years. I kept in touch with the team for the next decade, but contract restrictions and non-compete clauses with my various new employers meant that circumstances would never line up for me to do any more Roblox work.