Presentation

My Presentation and Notes

 The project I chose was the Xbox One controller design competitions. There wasn't a strict brief, all you had to do was download their template and create up to three designs to submit by the 31st December. So in many ways it was good practice to get work submitted within a smaller timescale. The theme I chose was cephalopods (it was Octopus' but that limited me as I realised I started drawings squid too!)

I love my games, and the idea of trying to create a design that would appeal to a large audience is an interesting prospect, it would be a good way to see how people respond to my design, ultimately people with the most votes win. Being able to network is some important these days, so any opportunity to promote my work is going to be beneficial. A lot of my inspirations comes from games be that from the story-lines or the characters.

When initially researching I looked at previous examples of Xbox Controller Designs (on slide1) I also looked at a vast amount of artists who've done illustrsations of octopus', this was a good way for me to see how they might render an image and the many ways to design the characters. It was very useful for looking at colour palettes too. I also went to the Aquarium and took photos of the various cephalopods  there, this was great to use as reference pictures.

I mainly focused on Jon Burgerman because I love the use of his bold colours and the way he creates characters. I also love how his designs can overlap without it looking messy! This was something I wanted to experiment and achieve for my designs. I looked through his book 'Pens are my Friends' and I noticed he did some work on 3D objects,  I thought this might be a beneficial way for me to practice creating something for a 3D object.

Initially I set myself a target of drawing at least 25 different characters before committing to the few or one to feature in my design, these are some scanned pages from my book. To try and gage what it would be like to create something for a 3D object, I got some little boxes and various other objects from the charity shop, painted them and drew straight on them with permanent marker. The overlapping design worked on the boxes, but when I came to trying to translate it on the Template it didn't work.

Once I knew what character I'd be using, I printed off lots of Xbox templates and started drawing variations and design ideas. I tried the overlapping design but like I said before didn't translate well it looked too messy. I kept drawing until I found a design I liked - at which point I repeated this design until I thought it was good enough to scan in to start the digital painting. Although most of my work in my sketchbook was done in pen, digitalising and creating a vectored image in illustrator is ultimately a better idea, as for a commercial business printing a design on possibly thousands of controllers they're going to want something that doesn't pixelate.

FINAL OUTCOMES

I didn't continue with the overlapping idea because from a gamers perspective more so for beginners you want to be able to see where the buttons are, so having lots of things to scramble that signal of where the buttons are and what the buttons are isn't a very good idea. I went for a simple background colour which applies to most Xbox Controllers, and created a design around the object that hopefully translates well in the designs. Really happy with my colour palettes. I have plenty more variations and development work of where the design could've gone digitally but glad I stuck to this!!!