With some visual research and concept decisions out of the way I began to think of some visual concepts. I wanted to come up with some ideas of how I would reflect the idea of travelling through the year in board game design. I thought of 3 solid ways in which I could represent this.
1. Represent the passing of the year through seasons and celebrations/ holidays. Research a number of holidays in which you can pull visuals from to portray the passing from September to july.
2. A very simple idea, Show the path of the board game journeying through a calender of all the different months.
3. The board game has a focus on surviving the first year of graphic design, and so the idea of treating the first year like a metaphorical obstacle course seemed like another appropriate idea.
Design concept 1
I looked into the first idea and found 13 holidays/ celebrations from September to July, which I thought could be useable. combined with the four seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. The celebrations were both religious and non religious. I then began to brain storm how each of these could be represented through Images/symbols.
Taking this, with some of the visual Research I had done, especially that by Kate forrester, I began to draw up a potential design plan.
As you can see from the images I have intertwined symbols from each celebration in order from September to july.
Design concept 2 - Calendar
I used the spider diagram from concept one and applied its values to this piece. Here I have drawn out a simple calendar, and illustrated each month with a celebration that happens during, or an illustration of its season.
I liked this idea, however I find that it wasn't the most appropriate as the months of the calander would often become covered up with the path of the game. I also felt like this might be a slightly too obvious way to represent the passing of a year? and the design I created above would be more subtle.
Design concept 3
As the board game revolves around the idea of trying to survive the first year of Graphic design, I thought another appropriate theme could run along that of an obstacle course.
After sketching this up however, I thought that this could be too serious for the light hearted tone of voice I was trying to pursue. I would like to seem more helpful in my piece of design, assisting the user to feel abit more comfortable and overwhelmed. Before I came to the university, I knew very much that it was going to be hard work, and I was already overwhelmed. I feel that pursuing the idea of an obstacle course would make them feel even more nervous, not put them at rest.
With these evaluations I have decided to continue to work with Design concept one. Next I will figure out what colour scheme I would like to work with, and which would be most appropriate, as well as working out the dimensions of the board.
I asked the course, on the Facebook group what colours they find most calm, as I want to calm my audience down from any negative emotion they feel, such as being scared and over whelmed.
The most popular replies I received were blue, white and cream. With this information I went onto Design Seeds to search for a colour scheme that was focused on shades of blue. I would rather work with white at the moment, just incase, in the end I decided to work with an off white coloured paper.
There were 2 colour schemes I found on this website that I really liked:
In the aim to also inject some fun into the game, and keep it light hearted, I have chosen the second 'tidal hues' pallet, it still has the relaxed feel of the blue I am looking for, with a fun punch.
I have also decided to make the board at a simple 460mm x 460mm square, I would have liked to design it at a size of 500mm x 500mm however, I would like to be able to comfortable fit the box net on an a1 sheet of paper/card and so I have reduced the final size.
The above Image displays the use of path design I had mentioned in my research, with a backdrop that is suited to the tidal hues colour swatches. I have chosen a darker colour for the backdrop as I want the illustrations to have a relationship and interact with the path. I want some of the illustrations so interact with the path as well as stand apart. I plan to use one of the lighter colours from the swatches as well as white for the illustrations, as well as the brightest shade for accents.
Above is the illustration I did for Eid, the illustrations interact with the border of the board and the path as I had planned. I continued to create illustrations of the same style, for other celebrations such as starting university, Halloween and Christmas.
However when looking at the board, although I was trying to portray the idea of calm by using blues I found that the colour scheme also seemed quite bland, in reference to the fact I was pitching a product for a prospect student, and so I began to experiment with the colour scheme adding in yellow as well.
Here I have flipped the colours and added the series of colours to the path aswell.
Original colour scheme with colour added to the path.
Original colour scheme with another colour such as yellow added, in order to initiate fun.
I found that I liked the original colour scheme, with colours incorporated into the path and so I continued to design with this idea.
However the day before the crit (Friday 19th April) I found that, what I was designing was not particularly appropriate for my audience. The design seemed quite feminine in the choice of illustration style, and I wasn't sure who who receive my board game. I also thought that the style itself was not appropriate for students. When looking at the design I realised that although there was a strong motive behind the illustrations of celebrations/seasons the board portrayed no reference to the subject of graphic design, and this was something I wanted to change.
And so I went back to the drawing board...
Instead of going back to one of the other concepts I had sketched up at the start of the process, I went back to the drawing board and came up with a brand new concept.
After looking online again at board game designs, I came across a graphic design specific board game called 'The pitch'. I found that when looking at the board, it had a very simple and effective layout. I think this is where my previous layout had fallen down, I think I had tried too hard to include too much detail, where in this case less would be more.
In this set up I preffered the use of a square path, I thought that this would further simplify and improve my design. The previous one appeared too cluttered, hopefully this would simplify it down.
The designer has also used simple illustrations that link to graphic design such as a scalpel and ruler. I thought that this was a clear way to link to graphic design, in the board design which is what I feel my previous attempt was lacking.
With these elements considered I began to think of how time or the passing of a year could be represented through the design. An idea that instantly came to me was that of a clock. This would be a clear way to represent the existence of time.
Below is a simple initial sketch that I came up with for the new idea. The new concept still has the same values as the old set up, however is much more formulated and clear for the eye to read.
The centre of the design concerns the clock as stated as above, and the path of the game, now in a square layout, surrounds the clock as if the players are passing through time.
The four quarters that surround the clock are filled with simple illustrations that refer to graphic design, these illustrations contain symbols such as, a pencil, mac, fibonacci sequence etc. I have also included gradient ladders for players to use, to go from the centre to the path of the board, and vice versa at the end of the game.
As for a potential colour scheme I thought back to the crit in which we presented design boards to a small group, and a couple of third years. There were two colours on my board that I had previously, in the initial stages thought about using. A blue and a berry colour, one of the third years suggested that they seemed to be similar to cyan and magenta from CMYK.
In light of this, I thought that I could use a black, white and grey colour scheme for the main aspects of the game, and use Cyan, Magenta and yellow as accents.
I began to draw up some simple illustrations, alike to those on the pitch in which I could use as a pattern in the four quarters. I thought about what equipment Graphic designers usually use such as, a mouse, pencil, pen, set square, ruler mac and camera etc.
I took the illustrations I had drawn in illustrator and made them into a square shape pattern that would fit flush into the quarters.
I put the patterned quarters into place and placed a simple clock illustration over the top, and surrounding the already existing format in a square shaped path.
I began to work on the logo that would appear inside the clock, and be a visual element for other objects such as the instruction book and the box.
For the visual element, I decided to play with the name, which was also a play on words 'First class or class ass?' referring to top and bottom of the class. I thought of visual connotations for both first class and class ass. Again I wanted to keep the style simple and clear.
The visual I thought of for first class was a ribbon, as these are used for celebration. I thought of a few symbols for class ass. These are shown below, I thought that the first plays more on the idea of a class clown, rather than being bottom of the class, and when I asked my peers about the second design, they thought it could be slightly inappropriate, and I also thought it could cheapen the design. One of my peers suggested another visual that could be linked with the word ass, such as a donkey. This was the strongest of the 3 ideas and so I have decided to implement it into the final design.
On the above design I worked more with the overall design of the clock, I felt that It could be more thorough in representing the year and so I replaced the 4 main numerals 12,3,6 and 9, to the 4 different seasons that make up a full year.
I added this onto the board aswell as the four gradient ladders.
Above also shows the path set ups and colour schemes that I played with and below is the one that I chose for the final board design.
Instead of writing on the squares where players would be initiated to pick up one of the three cards I decided to colour code them, and simply fill in the boxes with either cyan, magenta or yellow.
I used this design, to inform the rest of the pieces inside the box, next I started working on the 3 sets of cards. I already new that the colour schemes for these would be Cyan, Magenta and yellow.
I thought about trying to incorporate some fun patterns onto the cards however, they did not seem to match well, against the pattern I already had in the 4 quarters.
I remembered that simplicity was the key with this design and instead, took the pattern from the four quarters and changed the background colour to magenta, cyan or yellow.
I designed the back of the cards to be equally as simple by implementing the colour coded system, and a short amount of body copy and points score.
With these cards I will create a set of 48, 16 of each.
The design of the board also heavily influenced the design of the instruction book.
When designing the instruction book I decided to use the circle in the middle of the board as the shape for the piece, I also included the use of the pattern found in the quarters as the back of the design.
The inside consists of the same series of illustrations in a random formation, supported by the bodycopy that I had previously written during my research.
The instruction leaflet not only informs students how to play the game but also tries to calm them from being overwhelmed.
I created a mock up of this and was happy with the design, and therefor printed it again in scaled size.
Next I moved onto the design of the box, I wanted to again keep the consistency of style set out in the board, cards and instructions but keep the design from becoming too alike and boring, in order to avoid this I played with the accent colours Cyan, Magenta, and yellow more, making them more equal in ratio. I knew that I would have to feature the circle logo I had created and so I placed this in the centre of the design, as seen on the board game.
I also decided to use the idea of the four quarters to keep consistency, however I wanted to mix this up in order to keep the design from becoming tedious. Instead I have coloured the four quarters in cmyk.
Taking the design further, I wanted to use the illustrations I had already made as I thought adding anymore would begin break the consistency. The general aesthetic I wanted to produce on the front of the box was the appearence of a graphic designers desk, with equipment laid around as I would find on my own. I took these illustrations from the pattern that I had produced earlier.
other things that I wanted to include on the front cover were, things inside the box such as the game markers, cards and dice. However I have not yet come up with a design for the game markers and so I will limit this to the cards and dice.
The last thing I wanted to include on the front of the box was something that would indicate what was inside the box and who it was aimed at. To further continue the aesthetic of a desk top, and thinking about what most designers would have on their desk I decided to place this information inside a tea cup stain, as most graphic designers or what I have seen from my experience on the course like to drink tea.
As for the sides of the box, I wanted to place something there that would further add a small amount of detail to either what was inside the box or what it was about.
Here I thought to put the slogan 'How will you do this year?' I stylised this using the imagery from first class, the ribbon and class ass, the donkey.
When looking at the box for the board game Smorgasboard which I have found on behance, The thing I like most is the way that they had organised their content and the tone of voice they had used to communicate the purpose of the game. I wanted to reflect this in my design.
I decided to split my information up into the same sections.
In order to keep consistency I placed this inside a circle in the centre of the box, I then used the same series of illustrations and used these to create a pattern around the focal circle.
Other information I wanted to include was the same tea stain motif, the age and the amount of players that could play the game and I small note to say that it was designed by me.
Again I used one of the accent colours as a main colour, not to overuse black and make the board game boring.
The last thing I had to design was the game markers. Originally I had decided to design markers that would encourage the graphic design students to construct themselves. These would be characters, made out of cardboard, that would take on the appearance of typical graphic design students. However this previous idea, inspired by the cardboard characters below, no longer fit in with the aesthetic I had created.
Instead I decided to run with the simplicity of the piece, I wanted to take one of the illustrations I had drawn and replicate this 4 times, and cut it out of a soft wood I had found called Balsa, which I am able to cut through with a scalpel. I think that the mouse pointer shape will be the easiest shape to produce in the Balsa. once drawn and cut out I will try to mix paint as close to CMYK as possible and allocate each of the game pieces a colour.
Final Designs:
Production:
Game board:
In order to produce the game board, I was going to mount the design, once printed on white card onto a piece of mountboard which I would score and fold. However when experimenting with this, the mount board could not take the tension on one of the folds and in result, snapped. Due to this not working I had to think of another way to bind. It was suggested in the last power crit that I should try going down to the vernon street campus to the book binding section, and they would be able to help me with binding the board as if it was a real game board.
The process was not difficult and on the first day that i was there, I created a test to test the direction in which the board would fold, how it would take the tension, and furthermore once I had made the backing board, how the design, which I have printed on white card would need to be cut and folded in order to fit it precisely and efficiently against the board.
4 grey boards to make up the four quarters of the game:
Grey boards back onto bookram to ensure easy folding.
Inside the press to ensure the board sits flat in the box.
Final product, once the design has been put through the folding machine and mounted to the board.
I printed the cards in the digital dungeon on a matt card across two a2 sheets. The first time they printed they were very much out of sync as they were double sided and so I sent them through again, The second set were slightly better, however due to the cost of printing 4 a2's. I had to use what I had, if i were to do the project again I would thoroughly check that everything is set to line up.
I have produced the instruction book so that the circle shape which produces its form is consistent with the size of the circle on the front of the box. The piece contains liftable cards, so that users can interact with the guide, and this idea also conserves space.
I printed the box onto the same matt card as the playing cards however this did not prove strong enough for such a large surface area, and so I had to reinforce the box inside with strong white card from the library. I had planned to print on this card in the first place, as I had printed the design for my board on this in the print room however when I went down later in the week to print my box, I was told that the printers would not take the card from the library. I would have liked to print this on stronger card to make the design neater.
For the game markers I bought a sheet of balsa and drew the stencil of a mousepointer onto the wood which I had planned to cut with a scalpel.
However my dad works at a joinery business and offered to take them there for precise cutting instead, Below are a couple examples of what I received.
I mixed paint in CMY and printed the mouse pointers in CMYK to match the rest of the game.
Final piece:
