Lord of the Rings x Super Mario World
Per the suggestion of @CTRunsThis, via twitter.
I put a walking path in here, but we all know that one does not simply walk into Mordor. I managed to to fit Barad-dur, Mount Doom, and the nine Nazgul, but ran out of room for The Black Gate. It was pretty fun making what, in the end, amounts to an archetypal lava world.
By Alex Griendling / Blog / Twitter
Super Mario World versus Fallout 3! Fight!
By Alex Griendling / Blog / Twitter
Today I’m posting work that I made almost 20 years ago, when I was 8 - Wolverine and Nightcrawler, my favorite X-Men at the time.
I’m not sure whether I should be concerned or content with the fact that I still love the same things that I did back then.
I made a Game Boy using the palette of the original Game Boy! Figuring out how to make this work using only four colors was a fun exercise.
I don’t know what the whole three frame time warp tunnel is about. I just kind of threw that in for fun.
I wanted to experiment with light playing a more important role in a pixel portrait, and I’ve been reading a lot of Hellboy comics lately, so I made this! There are things I’d like to improve upon, but as a test, I’m happy enough to post it.
Robot Chicken’s creators and (some) of its producers stopped by Google today to give a talk, so I made this poster to be handed out at the event.
As a fan of the show, this was a fun opportunity to make an absurdist poster that aligned with the Robot Chicken’s general vibe.
I recently witnessed a freelance designer produce a wonderful piece of work for an morally questionable client. The salt in the wound was watching a multitude of other designers I respect lavish praise upon the designer and the work, never once questioning whom the work was made to benefit. While employees of a company still have the responsibility of choosing their employer, a freelance designer has the freedom to turn down clients based on any morale quandaries they pose.
Our work does not exist in a vacuum; it is given context and meaning and power by the places it appears and the people that benefit from its usage. When clients hire us, they’re doing so because they believe it will benefit them. With this in mind, it’s important to ask yourself the question “Is this client worth helping?”. If great work is made for those that exhibit repugnant practices, how does this benefit anyone other than the individual client? If said client has a history of harming many people, should that work be made, let alone praised? Even reaching beyond the work, am I to assume that the clients’ ideals reflect your own?
So please, think before you make, as your choice of clients is a reflection on you; and consider that, by praising work made for the morally questionable, you are, by extension, praising the morally questionable.
Note: I’m not going to mention any names because I respect everyone involved, and I’m not out to drum up any ill-feelings. I am being purposefully vague so that we may consider the impact of such work going unquestioned in the entirety of our industry versus focusing on a single instance.
To quote the great (albeit fictional) Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” I should end all of my posts with a Jurassic Park quote.
While I’ve yet to finish Bioshock Infinite, the game’s visual design has been nothing short of stunning. The game’s juxtaposition of beauty with extreme violence and dark themes prompted me to make this Murder of Crows Vigor bottle.
While digging around my computer last night, I found these sketches I’d scanned when I was making my Samus animated gif. Thought I’d post them for everyone who likes seeing how the hot dogs are made.
Today marks the launch of Google Treasure Maps (and my first appearance/voice-over in a Google video!). Anyone who has been following me for a while knows my love for process and the importance I place on sketching out projects prior to making them. With that in mind, I thought this would be a good opportunity to gloss over the process of redesigning Google Maps.
When we set out to make Google Treasure Maps, I sat down and sketched out a multitude of ways to handle things like terrain tiles, landmarks, and borders.
Once these ideas had solidified a bit, I began experimenting in the computer with different color schemes, textures and aesthetic approaches; ranging from 100% vector to 100% hand drawn, and hybrids that were a mix of both approaches. Here are a few examples.
After deciding on the third direction pictured, I sketched out a world map.
I then scanned this map and spruced it up a bit, which simultaneously helped to pitch the idea and gave us some idea of what to shoot for during the next month of actually building the map. Some ideas, such as the map’s border, were abandoned during production because of technical constraints and/or a lack of resources.
Next up, I split the map up into four different zoom ranges and decided how much information would be displayed at each zoom level. Below, you can see basic black shapes at the outermost level; slightly more detailed terrain, state lines and city icons at the next level; roads and landmarks at the next; very detailed terrain, road markers, and landmarks at the closest zoom. Again, various elements and features were cut over the course of production and we eventually settled on three levels of detail as opposed to four.
Once the zoom level detail was decided upon, I drew each type of terrain, later scanning it in and modifying it to work in the map. People far smarter than I then figured out how to place the terrain on the map without revealing the clear borders between each land type.
Last year, we replaced Google Map’s Pegman with an 8-bit hero. While I toyed with a few ideas, I eventually settled on the idea of a spyglass; I liked the idea of contextualizing Street View by using a pirate’s viewing device. I also remade the UI in red to introduce a little color into an otherwise brown map and to make sure an old compass was always present.
The Street View team really brought the spyglass idea home by doing this:
Now that the look and feel of the map was settled upon, I designed a handful of landmarks that served as a guide to other Googlers that were kind enough to contribute their time to the project. I believe that we ended up with 175+ landmarks, only 20 of which were designed by myself.
Finally, we began troubleshooting and embellishing the map with more details that would serve to make the map interesting for everyone, regardless of whether they were merely glancing at it, or spending more time discovering its secrets.
In the end, building this map from the ground up was a great exercise in designing with constraints, picking and choosing your battles, not being afraid to scrap ideas you like and coordinating a large team toward a single vision. It’s a cheesy adage, but I hope everyone else enjoys Google Treasure Maps as much as I enjoyed making it.
