Final Project Week Six
To recap, my project is a book about my (mostly Mario) Nintendo collection. I like collecting video game merchandise that ties in with series' that I like to play. It came to my surprise to find that there was not a lot of books, blogs or any real discussions about video game merchandise – most certainly the more obscure products. So I decided to make a book about my collection that's has high quality pictures, descriptions of both the product and my personal experience with them.
For the start of the project I was looking into video game memorabilia collecting blogs, books, videos and forums. I wanted to see what they have done before and see if I could do anything different to stand out or find something of worth to use in my own work. I noticed a common theme with each source that I read, the page layouts was not engaging. To avoid this I made sure that the book I designed would have different layouts to keep the reader engaged. It is also informative describing what the reader is looking at. After the research I then moved on to do lots of prototyping, which involved making icons for Mario's face using Adobe Illustrator. This felt important for me to get right because Mario is such a recognisable character in todays media. To get any proportion wrong on his facial features would be a disservice to the original creators that spent years perfecting it. I also wanted to make it really simplified, as I love really simple graphic work. So I made Mario one shade of colour keeping key features – another colour like the "M" on his hat and his moustache. It really says something about character design when after all that you can still tell it's Mario and I think thats important in my work. I also had the idea of section divider spreads that had simple graphics that represented the section. Such as in the figures, there would be a graphic of a Mario action figure. However that changed when I put a grey scale image and blended it with a red foreground colour and found the beautiful, impactful spread, that I liked a lot better.
Overall I'm really happy with the way this turned out has it gave me a stepping tone for me make this a Kickstarter project in the future with more pages and items. It's slick yet playful, which is just my style.
For the start of the project I was looking into video game memorabilia collecting blogs, books, videos and forums. I wanted to see what they have done before and see if I could do anything different to stand out or find something of worth to use in my own work. I noticed a common theme with each source that I read, the page layouts was not engaging. To avoid this I made sure that the book I designed would have different layouts to keep the reader engaged. It is also informative describing what the reader is looking at. After the research I then moved on to do lots of prototyping, which involved making icons for Mario's face using Adobe Illustrator. This felt important for me to get right because Mario is such a recognisable character in todays media. To get any proportion wrong on his facial features would be a disservice to the original creators that spent years perfecting it. I also wanted to make it really simplified, as I love really simple graphic work. So I made Mario one shade of colour keeping key features – another colour like the "M" on his hat and his moustache. It really says something about character design when after all that you can still tell it's Mario and I think thats important in my work. I also had the idea of section divider spreads that had simple graphics that represented the section. Such as in the figures, there would be a graphic of a Mario action figure. However that changed when I put a grey scale image and blended it with a red foreground colour and found the beautiful, impactful spread, that I liked a lot better.
Overall I'm really happy with the way this turned out has it gave me a stepping tone for me make this a Kickstarter project in the future with more pages and items. It's slick yet playful, which is just my style.
Pages from my book:
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