Showing posts with label icons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label icons. Show all posts

Thursday, August 15, 2013

While the cats are away... [9 Lives]










While everyone is away at Gen Con, here's a little treat for those of you like me who are staying home to catch up on work. These are the card designs in-progress for 9 Lives.

You can see a few tweaks to the rules reflected in this design. Gone are the stars you're trying to earn, in their place are cat-scratches you're trying to evade.

I've also given each cat a proper suit, so you can distinguish them at a glance while fanning your cards. I took that a step further, making the suit a color-coded background pattern reminiscent of anime and manga. I thought Kristina Stipetic's art lent itself well to this cartoony style.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Art Preview of Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game

KoiPond-Header-2

UPDATE: Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game is now available on DriveThruCards!

This week, I got a very good reason to hurry up and get the Koi Pond cards finalized ASAP. So the past two days have been very busy, implementing playtest-requested updates that have built up over the past couple months' testing. The game should be available for sale later this month!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  • Frames: I revised the face's backgrounds to not be full-bleed anymore. Each suit has a distinct corner decoration and background pattern. It's subtle, but I figured it couldn't hurt to have one more distinguishing mark for each suit to aid recognition.
  • Ambidextrous Layout: I've also placed suits and ranks on the left upper corner and the right upper corner instead of placing them on alternate corners. This makes it easier for people who prefer to fan their cards left or right. I was going to put suits and ranks on all corners, but it became really cluttered.
  • Increased Contrast: The frames also create the best contrast for easy recognition of suits and ranks. They were perfectly readable on the paper texture of earlier prototypes, but nothing beats black-on-white for immediate pop.
  • Color-Perception Assist: I got some notes from color-blind playtesters that while it was clear enough which two suits were represented in a hybrid, it was still difficult to recognize that it was a hybrid at a glance. So I've added an outer ring to hybrid suits.
  • Housecats, Cranes and Turtles: The most oft-requested revision was to add icona to the cranes, turtles and housecats so make it's clear from where they scored points and that they must be in your pond in order to score points at all. I've added small iconographic reminders of these facts to their respective cards.
  • Player Aides: The deck will also come with a thorough set of reference cards outlining the basic rules, how to score, the direction of scoring in each round, and how hybrids are considered when scoring. Four cards in all, the backs of which have a diagram of the play area clearly depicting the arrangement of your pond and river.
  • Ribbons: The game quite clearly notes how much one, two or three ribbons of a suit are worth. This is probably the most distinctly euro-influenced visual element. Hey, they know what they're doing.

I hope you'll enjoy Koi Pond when it's finally available later this month! It's a lovely, meditative game with subtle interaction and eye-catching art. It's also a nice, low-conflict introduction to new Knizia-style scoring for your friends and family.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

WIP: Island Siege Iconography



I've been spending the past few days working on iconography for Island Siege (now on Kickstarter)! There is a lot left to do, but I thought I'd show you how it's all looking so far. First up, the game comes with custom minted coins from Campaign Coins. If you've seen their past work, you know they're good. I'm looking forward to seeing these designs cast in that weathered bronze finish.


I was really tempted to put some meeples on that 10-piece crest, but I figured that was a little too on-the-nose. These will look great cast in a metallic finish.

Next up, the game called for a set of four flag icons: Pink, white, gray and black. The trouble in the prototype was that the white, gray and black flags looked too similar to each other. In particular, gray and white were hard to tell apart. The initial direction was to possibly add a unique icon to each flag to distinguish them, but these icons will be really small so I thought it made more sense to make them distinct silhouettes from the start.



Now it's very clear that gray is different from both the black and white flags. At small sizes, the silhouettes of black and white are still a little similar, but their stark contrast helps distinguish them. The black flag's tattered edge further reinforces the differences, if there were still any confusion between the two. The Coquina flag stands out on its own just for its color, but you know me, I always look for a chance to double-code.

Finally today, I want to show the "Imperial" icons. These go on an Imperial card card and represent three different effects. The first is basically just victory. The second is adding dice to your roll. The third is allowing you to reroll dice. The challenge here is that the game uses custom dice, so I couldn't just use a standard pipped die as an easy to recognize symbol. The die does have one very distinctive face showing a Captain's wheel, though. I used that as the signifier and placed it on a simple cube as you can see below.



Because two of the three icons referred to dice, their main signifier is the plus sign and the rotating arrow. Hopefully those are distinguishable from a distance and at small sizes. I added a touch of distressing to the edges so they still looked somewhat period appropriate. Perhaps the die should be smaller so those symbols take up more of the central focus? Either way, the client is pleased and so are the backers.

Still plenty more icons left to design, including forts, buildings, ships, meeples, various cubes and dice faces, too. Look for more soon and back the project so I can get paid!


Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Designers & Dragons Masthead Redesign and Icon Design [Logo Process | Case Study]

Designers & Dragons Before AfterDesigners & Dragons IconsEvil Hat Productions just announced that they'll be re-publishing Designers & Dragons, Shannon Appelcline's epic history of the role-playing game industry and community. They're going to expand the book into four volumes, each volume focusing on the events of on decade from the 70s through the 00s. Fred Hicks asked me to revise the masthead and create a system of icons representative of each decade of gaming.


MASTHEAD

This one was tough because we didn't want to stray too far into WotC's official branding and we needed to communicate "designers" as much as "dragons." The usual solution would have been to make each word a different font, as the original title had done. I explored that solution at first, just to get it out of my system, but as you can see from the design process below, we eventually landed on a more refined typographic solution. The slides below are actual pages from the design docs I sent to Fred.

Round 1

"Essentially the same idea as the original Designers & Dragons masthead, but much more refined. This update pairs the very contemporary Gotham with classic D&D font Fritz Quadrata. The ampersand fuses with the second D to become a smaller mark.

Or maybe you want to go full Fritz Quadrata...
...or all Gotham.
Perhaps something a little more formal and unified, if a little prudish. Trajan being a very stalwart “title font” for damn near everything, but particularly apropos on a history book.
Jenson has a slightly more aged, humanist feel.
Maybe we can try a very high-design approach here, pairing Bodoni and Carton, with a Bodoni italic ampersand lying firmly outside the rectangle. The organic curves of that ampersand make it a natural place for a light touch of the draconica, without going full-on TSR with it."


Round 2
"Continuing with the exploration of various Bodoni styles for “Designers” and arranging the various elements. Also using Diavlo for  “Dragons”
Maybe lowercase? It seems a little too busy and the swoops compete with Diavlo.
Two-tone to distinguish each half of the title?
Or go all the same? Probably room for a middle-ground. Also not sure if the Bodoni Italic is holding up well in this phase. Might need to choose another font.
Maybe make the whole thing Diavlo? The lowercase g’s would be right on top of each other, so I converted an uppercase G to be small caps. Hopefully it’s not too noticeable.
That’s definitely holding up better than Bodoni. What do you think?"


Round 3
"This time around, we’re equalizing the priority of “Designers” and “Dragons.” As noted in the last round, these are odd words to stack at equal weight because of the matching descenders in the g’s. Moving the ampersand down to the second line might help nudge the words off-center so they’re less crowded.
For the sake of curiosity, let’s try the title using the same typeface as the original ampersand font: Bodoni Bold Italic (&). Very classy and respectable. If we go this direction, I would recommend not adding a bunch of superfluous textures. A white title on a cover could be a slightly more professional direction.
For example...
Thoughts?"

Well, Fred liked it! So we proceeded to the icon design.


ICONS
Each volume focuses on a different decade of gaming, each with distinctive events that changed the nature of the industry. The 70s were the origin of RPGs as we know them, led by the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The 80s were the industry's adolescence and Cyberpunk was the flavor du jour. The 90s saw the rise of Vampire: The Masquerade and Magic: The Gathering, we decided to focus on Vampire. And in the 00s, the d20 license encouraged dozens of small studios to release their own products.

Round 4

"We’re going with this as the masthead, so let’s look at some icon options. These will be used in full-color online and on marketing materials. Smaller black-and-white dingbats will be used in in-line text. I focused on one icon for each decade – 70s: Sword, 80s: Chip, 90s: Ankh, 00s: d20.

The “fancy: icon suite in black-and-white: The icons remain flat, but have a few touches to suggest dimension. The type is subtle, but clear. The background arrows flow into each other, capped at the beginning and end with flat sides.
 Color versions of the “fancy” icon. Tried to keep them generally monochromatic, but keeping the same shade qualities throughout.

The smaller dingbat versions of the icons in color and black and white. The interior details of each icon have been removed, along with the banners and text. The spokes of the circuit had to be slightly extended so they were clearly visible. The d20 doesn’t hold up as well in this treatment, ending up looking either like a hex or a cube (which are still related to gaming, but not specifically to this decade).

Cover and Spine Mockups."



Round 5
The changes from here on were mostly cosmetic, hence the repeated captions.









Round 6


Adding a handful of circular dingbats to the suite.

And you can see the final results at the top of this post! Hope you dig them. You can find out more about the books and follow their development at the Designers & Dragons product page!