Hello friends, my name is David A. Hays, and I’m a creative director, artist, game maker, and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience in games and entertainment marketing.
I’ve spent my career helping build some of the biggest brands in entertainment, turning ideas into campaigns, stories, characters, worlds, and experiences that reach people at massive scale. At Riot Games, I lead Creative Direction for the global League of Legends publishing team, where I help shape the creative strategy behind trailers, music videos, esports moments, launch campaigns, and live experiences for one of the most passionate fan communities in the world.
The work is big, fast, emotional, and wildly collaborative. I get to partner with world-class animation studios, musicians, performers, agencies, artists, writers, designers, producers, and creative teams to make work that moves fans, builds culture, and regularly reaches hundreds of millions of views around the world. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best creative directors don’t just master one discipline. They build an arsenal of creative tools. My career has been shaped by curiosity, experimentation, and the constant pursuit of new methods and mediums to make my ideas real. I’ve learned by working alongside brilliant people in adjacent fields and by chasing my own creative instincts through writing, illustration, cartooning, typography, graphic design, web design, animation, apparel and footwear design, and–most recently–physical card game design.
That wide creative path has given me a hands-on understanding of how ideas become real: how a spark becomes a story, how an attitude becomes a brand, how a sketch becomes a product, how a campaign becomes a cultural moment, and how a game becomes something people want to play again and again. Whether I’m leading a global campaign or building an indie game publishing studio from the ground up, I believe great creative is an act of translation. It takes the soul of a product, the ambition of a brand, and the emotion people are waiting to feel, then brings them all together in a way that feels undeniably powerful and true.
Most recently, I’ve applied that philosophy and aimed my arsenal of skills into creating JOKERS, my first physical card game. It’s the kind of project I’ve been working toward my whole career: a complete creative expression that brings together the joy of game design, product development, world-building, character design, illustration, branding, marketing, community-building, and a million other creative tasks that all come together to create something truly original that people can hold, love, and share. ❤️
