This is an unofficial poster I created to advertise Pax Prime 2014. The event showcases and celebrates many types of games, including tabletop games in addition to video games. Each of the shapes in the poster represents a different game genre- puzzle games, MMOs, RTS games, first-person shooters, card games, D&D, platformers, RPGs, sandbox games, and fighting games.
I chose Pax to make a poster for because I love games and had always wanted to attend this event. Funnily, I designed this years ago while living in California, and finally got to go to Pax for the first time last year! In order to capture the spirit of Pax, it was important to me to depict a wide variety of games. I also purposefully included both male and female characters, as a nod to the demographic diversity of gamers.
Final Design:
Design Process
Phase 1: Sketches
In my initial sketches, I brainstormed a lot of different ideas. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to include a lot of different game genres. I played with different layouts, showcasing different game-related items like controllers, boss castles, varying consoles, game characters, and the players/convention attendees themselves. My class professor starred the concepts that he felt were the strongest, and from there I chose one to refine and create a digital version of.
Phase 2: Prototype
I chose the sketch of characters contained within trapezoid shapes to digitize. I pulled images of characters from various game series, sometimes including multiple from a game to represent gamer diversity. Two fonts that fit with the gaming theme were selected- one in a pixelated style, the other reminiscent of Super Mario 64. I turned in this first prototype for class.
Phase 3: Refinement
I later came back to this poster to refine it further. I liked the direction it was heading, but it felt cluttered, and the informational text, was not as noticeable as it could be. I also felt the game selection was too heavily based off of my own preferences and that I should add a wider variety of genres.
Some changes I made for the final graphic:
-Brought in a wider variety of game genres
-Reduced images in shapes to one per game
-Enlarged characters to fill more of the shape
-Tried to better match 'Prime' font to 'Pax' font
-Reduced number of font colors
-Moved text to center to break up the images and make date more prominent
Compared to my first digital draft, the final version is much cleaner.
**All character and game images used in this poster are properties of their respective owners and companies. From left to right, top to bottom:
Tetris © The Tetris Company
Boss Mida © Blizzard Entertainment
Boss Mida © Blizzard Entertainment
Ashe © Riot Games
Sergeant Johnson © Xbox Game Studios
Exodia © Konami
Dungeons & Dragons © Wizards of the Coast
Chell © Valve Corporation
Link © Nintendo
Sheep © Mojang
Ryu © Capcom
