HEAD BLOG

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about the death of print. Newspapers have been terrified by it and, in turns, avoid, deny and confront the possibility. Video games seem to be moving away from it, lured by the sultry promises of online advertising and smooth online deliveries through systems such as Steam. Apple have made digital delivery a reality with the App Store and we have all seen, and perhaps experienced, the ease with which new software can be obtained, bypassing the traditional bricks and mortar distribution channels.

There’s little point denying it or fighting it. The future of print and boxed product has changed radically.

So what does that mean for Publishers? And, more importantly, what does it mean for companies such as Head First who are charged with producing packaging solutions for games? Currently we do a lot of work online. Campaigns are thought out in every dimension known to man. We propose a campaign and think how would it work in print, online, PR and how it would play out if it were transferred into a stage show set on ice. It’s a full service offering we have going on around here.

So the change from print to digital wouldn’t, on the surface, change anything. Business-wise at least. We’ve always known that a good idea is a good idea which is flexible enough to work in any medium.

What the change would mean, however, is that packaging would alter drastically. Not because digital delivery don’t require cover illustrations, they do. Cover art can still be seen on music downloads and Apple’s new “reinvention of the 12inch” approach could actually breathe new life into the artform.

But games, as always, are different. Or they like to think they are.

The biggest difference between a musician and a game developer is skillset. Musicians, on the whole, aren’t designers. They aren’t illustrators or photographers. Game developers, on the other hand, have a whole range of skills at their disposal. Including some very talented artists. When we begin work on a game campaign we sometimes get a suite of assets which to either use or draw inspiration from. Some of it is amazing, some of it decidedly GCSE. And you wouldn’t always know it from the skill with which the game it being put together. But it’s getting easier for Developers to believe the skills of a game artist are an easy and cheap way to control their “brand”. As the need to understand the print process lessens, the arguments to use one of the in-house artists become stronger. And sometimes with great effect. Personally I dig the new cover artwork for Borderlands. It’s well executed, eye-catching, uncluttered and has a certain iconography about it that we’d be proud of getting through. The designer or team involved was a great mix of illustration and design.

And I mean “mix”.

Illustration and design are two distinct disciplines. And that’s key to any attempts to create cover art. After the research and the experience stages of pack design comes design. Layout in terms of design can be a very different thing to composition in terms of illustration (just look around at the websites of illustrators and you’ll see how amazing art can be set on the most clumsy, poorly laid out websites).

Let me give you a story.

Many years ago we produced a logo which happened to be 3D. It was for a game that was itself 3D.

During the presentation the client (who happened to be the developer) turned to me and said that if he’d wanted a 3D logo then he’d have got one of his very talented (and they were) 3D artists to do it.

No doubt they could have got the texturing and the lighting finished to a much better standard than we had. But he’d missed the point. The logo wasn’t 3D because we had a new bit of software (in those days it would have been a process to avoid rather than embrace due to the primitive nature of the software). The logo we presented was 3D because that was the right thing to do for that product. It helped project the right set of associations at the time. And that 3D logo was initially designed by someone who understood logo design. That person (our Creative Director, Carl Pugh) had years of experience in designing logos. He had the skill to create a logo type that suited a product, that could become (as Steve Jobs calls them) a gem.

The logo was approved eventually though in its much earlier vector format. It looked distinct enough but it didn’t add that extra polish to the packaging we were aiming for. On a different pack, as a different approach, it would have been perfect.

As we move to more and more digital downloads. As our shelves move from the high street to our phones and computers, the need for more thoughtful, more designed cover art will increase. The browsing experience along with the triggers that draw our attention, will need to be re-examined.

But then we’re back to the merits of the idea coming first.