Design Stuff Archive

The Evolution of a Thumbnail

The latest project on LoL is Final Fantasy VI: Five Script Blitz, a video/article series where Mato compares five FF6 scripts all at once. We needed a name and logo for ~branding~, so I set to work.

At first, it was called “Five Script Mix”. I’m still learning the basics of design, so here’s the first process:

Mato wasn’t a fan of the gradient, and we also tweaked the name a bit, so this was the next one:

Perfect! Forever done. It’s the template we’ll use for all of them. Here’s day 2:

Buuuuut, wow Day 2 looks way too same-y when compared to Day 1. We gotta make a change. I tried to incorporate a screenshot that would best sum up each day, and it was messy at first:

Looking better, but the text on the bottom felt too busy and out of place. So I did another tweak:

Yeah!!! We got it!! … except …. There’s a typo in “comparison”. Well, gotta fix that:

Yessss, now we finally got it! This is the style we’ll use for the rest of the project.

The Programmer vs the Designer: Thumbnail Edition

Mato stayed up late last night working on the latest article about what Japanese fans think of the Pkmn G/S Spaceworld leak. He posted a possible thumbnail in the work chat and said “i tried but this is the best I can do 🙁 ” and asked for me or Tony to improve it. Here’s the pic Mato posted:

And then Tony, being a professional graphic designer and a lover of all things font, came up with this before I even woke up!

Mato & I are very grateful to have Tony on our team~~

The Creation of the Legends of Localization Logo

Two and a half years ago when Mato, Tony, and I were working on our first book, Tony went through a long process to create a professional logo for us. Tony’s the designer of all the LoL books, and he also loooovvvves fonts and typefaces. Thanks to his hard work, we have a pretty iconic logo:

But how did Tony reach that final design? Scroll through these annotated screenshots for an inside look!

Site Design & Funky Fantasy IV Book Progress

I’ve been working on a lot of stuff this week even though it barely feels like it.

One good piece of news is that a Fangamer pal helped make the HTML of the new site design for the main LoL site. I’ve still got a lot of internal work to do to make it work with my custom WordPress coding so I don’t think the design will be up for a few months, but it’s good to see it coming together finally. The best thing is that it’s mobile-friendly and can resize automatically to fit different screen types / dimensions. Besides being super helpful for mobile readers, it’ll help with search engine ranking too, since mobile friendly plays a part in those crazy algorithms too.

The last few days Tony and I have been working on the base layout for the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book. It’s coming along well but it’s still very early and will change a lot I’m sure. At the moment it looks like it’ll be in the area of 250-300 pages long. Here are some example layouts we experimented with earlier this week that are now outdated.

We’re already working on something different from those two samples. We’ve decided what kind of info we’ll continue to use, what kind of info we’ll drop (mostly the uninformative ones that sound like they’re from a bad TruTV show), and how we’ll arrange things. In the end it looks like it’s going to be a mix between our This be book bad translations, video games! book and our main Legends of Localization books.

It doesn’t look like much now but I can tell this is gonna be one of my favorite books I ever work on!