League of Legends’ skins remain a major part of how players connect with the game, shaping everything from champion identity to long-running thematic lines. As the catalog expands, questions around in-game skin quality, direction of themes, and how each new release fits with a champion’s core have become recurring discussions within
League’s community.
At the same time, fan-made concepts and player feedback continue to influence new ideas, raising hopes that more community-driven designs might eventually find their way into the game. During the
2025 World Championship weekend in Chengdu in China,
Sheep Esports sat down with
Stephanie Leung, Lead for
League of Legends Cosmetics, to explore how skins are conceived and how they continue to shape the player experience.
Could you walk us through what you do on your day-to-day work?
Stephanie Leung: "Part of my job is to lead the team that goes into setting strategy, figuring out with the team what it is that we're making, what is our roadmap going to be for the year, how are we going to fly out all the different types of content, how do we match it with the right time in the year, the right events, the right seasonal content to make sure that all of that content feels cohesive where it's supposed to, and then also feels fresh, interesting and fun.
This year, we had the three-season format introduced. How does that work for your team?
Stephanie Leung: It's been a welcomed challenge, is what I would describe it as. Especially coming off of Arcane, working on seasons that are more lore-based, like Welcome to Noxus, is something we were starting to get more familiar with after having worked on Arcane the past year and then before in 2021. And so, Noxus was an interesting challenge because it's so visually distinct as far as our regions go.
One of the ways that we wanted to explore something that felt really Noxian, but also could be more elevated, was the idea of the Black Rose. That was a fun idea we had come up with alongside the Seasons team to make sure the cosmetics content would still feel cool and unique and not just Noxian champions in Noxus.
With season two being set in Spirit Blossom, is just what I would consider to be our bread and butter. The team loves doing Spirit Blossom. It's always so much fun, and being able to take that a step further and introduce and play with Spirit Blossom Springs was probably one of the highlights of the year. That's just something that we're excited to continue to explore for thematics just in general as we continue to figure out what we're making.
Will Riot ever consider adding fan-made skins into the game?
Stephanie Leung: We've been exploring how to do that for a lot of different years in a lot of different ways, and I don't think we've quite found the best way yet, but some of our more successful skins over the last year or so — I'm thinking frankly in particular about Train Conductor Ornn — were ideas born from the community.
That's something we're trying to make sure we're continuously keeping an eye out on. And while it might not look exactly like a fan made skin that already exists, we take the core idea and fantasy that we're aiming for with that champion and then reimagine it as how we actually think. That encompasses some broader explorations as well as just looking into what actually lands and what makes sense.
On top of that, we've been trying to thread this needle for a while now where we've done some of those fan-pool skin ideas in the past when the skins came out. Most of them didn't really land and I don't think we've quite figured out what that disconnect is yet. That's something we're interested in continuing to explore, but it might need to look a little bit different than what the polling used to look like because I was like ‘there's something different here. There's something weird that's not matching up.’ So definitely always on the mind, and we're just experimenting with a lot of different ways to get that player feedback.
Heading into 2026, is there any hint you can give us of the skins that you're working on?
Stephanie Leung: April Fools skins are my bread and butter. They're my favorite. I'm really excited for the ones next year and want to also bring back Day Jobs, but we're trying to do a little twist on it next year.
Recently you released a couple of Mecha-themed skins, Darius and Wukong. How do you decide which champion to give which skins and how to make them unique compared to others?
Stephanie Leung: It started with us exploring what Mecha Kingdoms actually meant as a theme, because there's a lot of Mecha stuff that can feel very ‘samey.’ But the moment that it clicked was with Sarah, the art director on the project was doing a lot of research and mood boarding around Japanese-style mechas versus more Chinese-style mechas. So the Japanese style ones are so much more angular and geometric, whereas your Chinese style ones actually have a lot more curvature. And one of the things that stood out for the first launch of Mecha Kingdoms that was so successful that we wanted to preserve was that animal style and having that kind of theme implemented into the skin.
From there, it's a weird art and science process where we get a bunch of artists into a room and just a bunch of the other cosmetics folks as well, and we start throwing out ideas like ‘oh, we think that this could be a good champion fit for this skin line’ and just start to see where it starts to click for people, where multiple people could see that skin happening for that champion. And we could do this or that with the weapon or with X, Y, Z ability. And so those are the ones that we try to pull out first. From there, we'll do a few passes on the concepts to just start ideation and explore broadly. Sometimes the ideas that we were really excited about pan out perfectly on paper and we're like ‘yes, absolutely, let's do that.’ And then other times where we just can't quite get it right, so from there we try to narrow it down.
Mecha Kingdom Wukong was an interesting one because we were super aware going into it that there were a bunch of adjacent skins, but there's this special spot for him that works well with what we're trying to make sure that Mecha Kingdoms embodies. And so it was almost like a challenge to thread that needle for him because we thought it would actually be additive to his catalog. So looking forward to seeing a lot more of the sales data and player reception from those skins. I personally actually have yet to take a look at it, but we'll see if we were able to thread that needle. But it was definitely a fun, interesting challenge.
Actually, this came up in some of the fan meet and greet that we had yesterday [in Chengdu, China], and it's pretty at the top of my mind too. But for some of our less popular champions, one of the things that we've also been doing is trying to make sure that whatever thematic we put them in — because the skin cooldown for them is so long — that whatever skin they actually get next is actually cool and was worth waiting multiple years for. Because the worst thing would be for it to be really disappointing when ‘oh my God, my champion finally got a skin,’ and then you're like ‘wait, that's it? That's kind of a lame skin!’ Just feels particularly bad for those less popular champions too. That was a bunch of the explorations we were also doing from Mecha Kingdoms as well.
Stephanie Leung: That it's good feedback for us to receive because it helped us take a look at what was actually not landing and make a lot of adjustments to that. It was a pretty chaotic year for us looking back and being like ‘hey, why aren't these things landing in the way that we wanted them to?’ And so over the course of the beginning of the year, we redid the Noxus Pass skins and spent a lot more time on Mordekaiser, and Morgana was in the works at the time, but we also went back and made a bunch of changes to her skin based off of the learnings of Noxus as well. So I hope that some of those learnings have taken it through to the later skins that we shipped over the rest of the year.
We're starting to see a much stronger end of the year than we were at the beginning of the year. But it was just the fact that we were a little bit hit or miss, particularly with some of the Noxus stuff early on in terms of delivering the actual fantasy in a way that was coherent and that manifests in so many different ways.
It's been really good for us to take the time to slow down and be able to reflect and make some updates to our systems because oftentimes it can be really easy to just get caught up in the ‘go, go, go’ with skins. There's always so much stuff to do.
What is something about your team or the work that you do for the fans that you would like the fans to know?
Stephanie Leung: It's the amount of care, effort and time that goes into every single little decision that we make. We have been doing a lot of player and champions’ feedback on all of the exalted skins and the mythic variants that we've been shipping this year. But we spend so many hours just talking with players and champions’ mains about ‘what is actually cool about this’ and ‘do you really think it's cool?’
What's really interesting is that sometimes having those discussions about a specific skin over a longer period of time with that same group of people can make all of us tunnel vision into that skin. And so it's been really helpful for us because we're like ‘oh, you know what? We have to remember to zoom out and look at how this fits into the broader portfolio for this champion and the rest of their skins.’ That's something we always take into account when we do champion selection. But sometimes you get so in the weeds with each skin because you're looking at every single detail and obsessing over it that we almost forget to zoom out at the end.
So we've been trying to be a lot more conscious of that to make sure that what we are going for at the very beginning is also what we're shipping at the end. The process is so long, all the micro decisions and iterations just lead to a fundamentally changed product every single time. Making sure that vibe and essence that we're setting out to deliver at the beginning was still there is really important to us."
Heade Photo Credit: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games
