The challenge consisted of picking a house from the GoT TV show and creating a sigil, a wordmark and a poster. All three projects were split into three different parts, but the poster would be combined with all previous works. The main instructions from the Futur was to make the designs legible, unique, bold and appropriate to the show.

Part 1: The Sigil_

The house_

I went for the almost extinct house that had probably no fans left, but I’m a walking contradiction. Instead of making it simple for myself and picking a popular house, I picked House Baratheon. I have the tendency to corner myself when making choices.

The research_

I would recommend anyone not to skip this part of the process despite working from a brief given by an art director. Usually briefs are very concise and can help you get started with the right look for the design you are working on. However, if you are not familiar with what you are being asked to create, then this part of the design process is essential. Don’t jump into sketching anything right away or at least don’t get too attached to whatever you create at the beginning.

I always spend more time doing research than designing itself. I also altered my sources. I know the books had more meaty content to pick from, so I decided to use the Song of Ice and Fire wiki website for more information about the House of Baratheon. With any good Fantasy story like GoT, the lore always comes with an expanded universe, characters and stories. I did this and I also did a mind mapping exercise. There is also another thing that I had to take into consideration, which is that the show and the books are a more gritty and realistic version of fantasy. This also comes in handy to make the design pieces more appropriate.

Aside from googling things related to the show itself, I also decided to do some reading about stags and learn more about the animal characteristics. This is very important when you create abstractions or drawings of animals, people and even things or locations. Determining key characteristics of what you are set to draw or design will help you make creative choices along the way. It will also help you with abstraction.

The third aspect in my research was about digging the realistic aspects of the show and the books. I already knew this from reading parts of the books a few years ago, but I went in and did some further reading and YouTube bingeing about the War of Roses since George R. R. Martin used this real life conflict as inspiration for The Song of Ice and Fire series. This Civil War happened towards the end of the 15th Century in England and similar to Game of Thrones, it was the fight of two Houses for the Throne of England. The conflict ended in the birth of one of the most important dynasties in English History, The Tudors. This helped establish the right century to base my style for the pieces.

Developing the concept_

Now that I sort of had some idea, I decided to do some mind mapping exercises. This is important because it helps you filter out excess information and also helps you determine what is going to be the key words to help you find the right images for references. I personally do this while I’m doing the research back to back in order to polish my research.

After picking up the keywords from the research and the mind mapping session, I went online and picked some visual references for three key elements: Game of Thrones Baratheon visuals, images of Stags, and images of printed books and engraved illustrations from the 15th century.

The sigil design_

I did some quick sketches on paper, decided to showcase two key words: fury and royalty. A rampant position would have been a bit more dynamic but it’s hard to showcase fury in that position. Those animals usually display more agile characteristics, but using the eyes and the antlers to showcase the imposing nature of an adult stag felt like the right decision.

I drew the whole concept in Procreate and then created the final version in Affinity Designer on my iPad since it was very convenient, and I wanted to learn the application. The process was quick and pretty smooth. I had some difficulties with Affinity but it was mostly because I’m not used to working with the application. I ended up loving it.

Part 2: The Wordmark_

The script_

During my research and mind mapping session I encountered the usage of Uncial and Gaelic scripts all throughout the ASoIaF fan wiki and in some of the TV Shows props. These types of scripts were also common with illustrated manuscripts and printed books back in the 15th century and prior. I did not want to make the wordmark too complicated, and I wanted it to fit with the sigil. Therefore I decided to look for an uncial font that matched the shape of the antlers.

Modifying the font _

I found a font I liked and did the lettering based on that. I altered the letters and applied some kerning. Then, as a way to show continuity with the show I applied the bars used in the GoT. I checked the meaning, and apparently throughout different seasons, the amount of bars varied so I just kept it at three to reference the three brothers. As a side note, I think I spent more time adjusting the kerning of the Wordmark, and I was still tweaking it right before I submitted. I am still not 100% happy with the results.

Part 3: The Poster_

Change of style and references_

Working on the poster ended up being the simplest part of the challenge. I was not sure I could really get it done, because I’ve been super busy with finishing Oak & Iron’s game components. I was also finishing some personal projects, but when the third part of the challenge was announced, the Futur flipped the script a bit with their brief. They said they wanted something minimal and similar in style to what Olly Moss does with his movie posters. In a way, that saved me a lot of time.

Examples of Olly Moss’ work

Since I didn’t have much free time, I asked some of my friends who are GoT fans what I could look into about the house of Baratheon and one of them mentioned Robert’s hammer. His description definitely sparked my attention. I looked into the Song of Ice and Fire wiki for more details and I was fascinated by the Robert’s Rebellion storyline since it triggered all the  events in the books and the show, specifically the Battle of The Trident. The way it was described and depicted by the books was very epic. This battle resulted in the Rebellion and that sort of lead Robert to become king. Since it was such an important moment for the House of Baratheon I went ahead and decided to use it as an important theme in my poster. I also did some extra research on Olly Moss and checked what kind of style I could go for. I liked his double exposure inspired scene posters.

The first thing I did was to draw a rough composition in Procreate of how I wanted the poster to look like. One thing I wanted to make sure with this poster was to establish some continuity from the sigil and the wordmark so I made sure to draw the stag’s antlers similar to the one from the sigil. The other thing I had to do was to make enhance the double exposure effect with the clever use of negative space. I manipulated the drawing of the stag so the eyes would be the moon and the mountain on the left would be the inside of the ear of the antler. Then I used Photoshop to add effects and color correct it.

Bonus Poster_

References_

https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lineages_and_Histories_of_the_Great_Houses_of_the_Seven_Kingdoms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(heraldry)

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madirishman/baldur/

https://pin.it/nr2mkmnwry2ly4

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It’s been almost three years since I’ve been working on Firelock Games’ Blood & Plunder and I haven’t had the chance to write about my journey so far. Let’s resolve that a bit. Prior to Firelock, my experiences with tabletop games were a combination of Monopoly, Chinese checkers, and Parchis.

Blood & Plunder while in the same category of other “tabletop games”, is far from a board game. It is a historical miniatures game. I had no clue that such things existed. My first time trying it was a disaster and I honestly don’t think I’ll ever get any good at it. It looked complicated and, with all of its different components, it is. First, you have unit cards full of stats that tells you how well your units can hit or how good you avoid getting killed. All of this based on how good you roll dice, which is totally random. Second, there’s the measuring tapes that you use to measure your moves and the math involved in it. Third, there’s also your opponent’s the line of sight that you have to beware of constantly so you don’t get a surprise ambush of sorts. Finally there’s all the extra rules and tests you have to learn in order to play the game properly and to add more flavor to your units. I didn’t even get to mention the naval games or the ship movements, but that is a another story.

Despite the fact that miniatures gaming isn’t really my thing, I was drawn in by the immersive concept and the miniature soldiers caught my attention. My favorite part was the theme. It was real historical pirates. That was new. Most kids I’ve met in college here in the US were obsessed with Jack Sparrow and, despite that being cool and all, I never really cared much for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, to be honest. However, my exposure to pirates was very different. Growing up, I was introduced to old Errol Flynn films and all those adventure books written by Alejandro Dumas that I read when I was in middle school.

Back in early 2016, my initial gig with Firelock was to work on some ads for Blood & Plunder and the company’s landing page for the game. In the design world, I’m known as a generalist. That is why I ended up working not only on Firelock Games’ marketing materials and website, but also on their branding and game component design.

I was lucky enough to find out that a lot of the existing assets such as company and game logos were done by a professional. That made my job a lot easier. Some of the initial concepts and ideas had been laid out too! The challenge was to make sense of all of that and turn it into a cohesive system. Basically, my job was to connect all the dots and find the right visual tone for the game.

Concept

The core concept of Blood & Plunder as described by Mike Tuñez, the lead designer, was a very simple, but very tactical gameplay, flavored with historical accuracy and a lot of adventure. The word immersive jumped out to me right away and it was something that I also decided to apply throughout the process.

Process

My approach for the design process was inspired by designers that work on film props, specifically, the House of Mina-Lima. They are the ones responsible for the props in all the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them films. I did a lot of reading about them and their design process for the films back in college and I found their work fascinating.

They pull a lot of influences from design history. They do their research and gather a lot of material from earlier periods in history and implement the visual style and even more traditional techniques in their prop designs. Their process, combined with extreme attention to detail and a bit of a DIY mentality achieves immersive and realistic set pieces that are so distinctive in Mina-Lima’s films.

Research

Popular movie franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean or other popular pirate films with a lot of fantasy in them were out of the picture. The first place to look for references was, what I like to call, my design bibles: Megg’s History of Graphic Design and Taschen’s Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1. Those two books are my go-tos for beginning any design project. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. I always work with references on what is proven to work and, in this case, I needed to have a sound understanding of how graphics were used back in the 17th century. I was also provided with plenty of sources because Mike is a pirate otaku. We also had outside assistance from well-known historian, Benerson Little. He’s the scholar who worked as a consultant for the award-winning Starz show, Black Sails. Both of them provided me with access to premium historical content.

I learned that the 17th century was a very quiet time for printing innovation. A lot of the graphic elements were still from printing blocks used from earlier centuries,
specifically, the Renaissance. This was useful because it helped me narrow my search for authentic graphics. There was another interesting discovery: the lack of technology advancement didn’t stop the rise of literature around that period. The Europeans were publishing books like never before. This also allowed me to find plenty of material to get inspiration from.

The most common typeface used on printing material was Caslon. That was another piece of good information since it helped me find the right typefaces to use for the period.

Now all the research and seeing people playing and testing the game was not enough. I had the historical references but I needed to add some fun-and-adventure aspect.

Video Games Influence

I was immersed completely. Between my own professional research, hourly historical lectures, and the never-ending stream of sea shanties wafting in from the office next door, I was inspired. It also helped that we had a fantastic photographer with a great eye and beautifully immersive terrain for presentation. It was most definitely not all on me.

In Part 2 I will go in depth about the design and prototyping process.

Industry:

Tabletop Miniatures Games

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