Drawings wont cut it

Start of a new day

After much deliberation of what the game should be based on, I finally decided to settle onto aliens, as this would give a greater artistic freedom when it comes to designing logos and laying out the image for the front cover.

From here I decided to continue working on paper to try and draw an initial concept of the front cover of what I could see in my head

(Insert Image)

As you can see, I am no artist but the general concept was there. So the sleeve was decided, it was now time to decide what to do with the logo. After too many hours of initial research, I came across a concept called negative space, in which an image is shown within the white space through clever design like this one below:

(Insert Image)

So now comes the long process of trying to design a really clever logo.

I really am no artist

So I sit here staring at hundreds of different negative space logos thinking "how did they figure it out" expecting a eureka moment to strike me.

It didn't.

So I start scrolling through the thousands of YouTube videos on how do design a logo in the hopes to get some sort of inspiration to design a logo.

I gave up.

So after about 30 minutes of pacing, quiet mumbling to myself with the kids thinking, daddy has finally lost it, I decided to start drawing some sketches to see if anything I drew could be turned or combined into a negative space logo.

This is what I got:

First set of  ideas

Second set of ideas

Not pretty but I started to get something. In the first set I was thinking of words that can be shaped to look like animals and thought of dog. Dog didn't seem that easy so I started to go with the word pup but got nowhere. But that idea made me think of shark. That idea didn't seem to work either so I then thought why not make a word fit into the shape of an animal and use that as a logo.

Boom Shark was born....... and put on a shelf

So I had decided on a logo that would have used negative space in some aspect. It was going to be the word Boom in the shape of a shark. But I wasn't happy, again, and decided to put it to one side.

The problem being (Aside from being very self judgemental and expecting nothing less than the best from myself) was that through the initial research it became very apparent that the font type played a big part in editing and this would also be a key issue in my logo too.

So I started to consider other logo designs and I came across a video on YouTube where person created a 3d cube and took parts of it out to make a really cool looking logo seen below:

But I wanted to make something clever, like this but actually able to read some sort of text as well. So I started to think of how can I use the 3d cubes and make some wording appear in them too? It was at this point I was inches away from head butting the desk due to a combination of extreme work load, late nights, early mornings and non stop kids and thought it may be a good idea to go to bed.

Have to start somewhere

And so it begins

A requirement of the assignment I am doing requires me to keep a project logbook of the work I am doing in the form of a blog, hence the reason for this post and the subsequent posts.

What to do?

The first problem I ran into with this project (aside from lack of time) is what to base the design on and whether it should be a game or a DVD. After about two days of going back and forth, I decided to with a game which bought on a whole host of new problems.

Looking at the two main consoles, the art on the discs vary for each console. The logo for the discs on the PS4 are located at the bottom, whereas the Xbox One logo is placed upon the top of the disc. The DVD sleeve varied depending on the publisher and not the console but what seemed to be a constant was that a certain area of the left side of the sleeve had a certain amount of space reserved for text, bar-code , PEGI information and other various details.

Hurrah! A choice has been made!

So after about an hour of deliberation I decided to go with the Xbox One design as I preferred the style of the disc compared to the PS4 discs. From here I decided to draw an initial design for the disc. 

DVD first draft

I settled on a title after carefully deliberating what would be possible for me to edit and possibly draw using the adobe suite. My original concept was trying to create a clever image that incorporates the hole of the disc. So I decided to draw an alien design for the disc artwork which actually seemed like it would suit the sleeve instead. So I decided to edit the original draft and make a new design.

DVD second draft

I thought it would be a good idea to see how the actual disc looked and came up with the second draft as seen above. From here I was debating whether I should put the tile on the disc, or try and go for just an image. It was from this point I drew the third draft minus the art work.

DVD third draft

After looking at a disc for the Xbox One, I decided to try and get the disc looking as real as an actual game disc and measured each of the logos on the disc. The placement of the Logos did vary from disc but the measurements were always the same. So from here I can Photoshop images to the disc and design a logo for the movie.

Too much to do

I then decided to turn my attention to the sleeve itself. The artwork from the first draft was going to be the basis of the cover image, but what I did need to design was the layout of the left side of the of the sleeve, the back of the case.

Sleeve first draft

The bottom half of the back was easy to design as all of the game cases had the same layout and generally the same content. The top half is where the publishers had artistic reign. I decided to not have the images in a neat fashion and wanted to make it different. I also wanted to include an image on the back too, but have not decided what to put there but have a space reserved for it. It was from here that I decided to get some precise measurements for the logos and symbols at the back of the case.

Sleeve second draft

At this stage, I decided to measure the logos, symbols and boxes for the images. The layout is very close to the final design I had in mind, the only thing that is left for me to do is to decide on the images and the fonts that will be used for the text that is in the top half of the back of the case.

Tomorrow, I will design the initial drafts in Photoshop and Illustrator and work from there.