Thursday, February 16, 2012

The results of the ADOM II design competition

So the ADOM II design competition over. And just starts ;-) First of all: Thanks to all the submitters for their dedication, work and creativity! I over all the submissions (although I have favorites, too ;-) ). Thanks also to everyone who commented and voted over the past couple of weeks.

Now I'm going to do what I announced... that is: take the comments and votes and decide on the next steps. Here we go...

Basically I was personally most woed by three submissions (all the others were great, too, but you have to decide at some point ;-) ):

  • I was blown away by the professionalism of Wojciech Mazurs submission. Far above anything I even could think of.
  • I was amazed about the logo design of Ravenmore - far more creative than anything I could have imagined. I have to admit that I personally do not design the website submission that much as it seems to take up too much space (for my personal tastes) and is (to me) a bit too bare bones. But that's again tastes.
  • I was enamored by the raw emotion of Kalle Kolaris banner design.
So there I am and I'm wondering what to do.

Basically I would like to proceed like this:

  • Most votes and comments showed similar preferences regarding the top two.
  • Many comments on Facebook and in the threads showed a desire to see a mixture of Wojciech and Ravenmores design.
Thus first I'd like to ask the two of them if they really could imagine working together (however that may be done) to create a combined design. If they would like not to (which I'd fully understand - there's no problem or shame about that - I have been known to be picky about my "artistic" taste for ADOM, too, and I think that's perfectly appropriate ;-) ), please let me know. Then I'll think again :-)

If you'd be willing to cooperate I'd credit you both and consider you both for the future because the combination of completeness and professionalism from Wojciech combined with the highly original and totally appropriate logo design from Ravensmore could yield a perfect match when adjusted appropriately to fit.

For the time being I will use Kalles banner as the new logo of the website - and then we'll see how the website needs to be adjusted. I personally love it a lot but since the majority does see it in forth place that's the most I want to do for now. I'd hope that we come to some result before the release of ADOM II 0.3.0. On that front the new schedule says that in a short while (probably still two weeks or so) ADOM II 0.2.3 will be released to test the enormous load of new features contained in it, then maybe a quick bug fix release 0.2.4 and then close behind 0.3.0 (the main tasks for 0.3.0 will be the missile combat system, complete rebranding, starting ADOM II Deluxe and getting the installer finished, so that's doable in a shorter while than for the transition from 0.2.2 to 0.2.3). SO we have some time to make another stab at a perfect design.

Once again thanks to all the others: Your submissions have been great, too, and each has its merits and strengths... but I have to make some decision. As I'm not known for my exquisite design taste please forgive me for not choosing any other submission - it definitely has nothing to do with the quality or originality of your work!

16 comments:

  1. Sounds/looks promising---congrats too all on their hard work and here's hoping some collaboration can indeed happen.

    Heh, I still hope the banner dragon goes Multi-hue by the Deluxe launch. ;p

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    1. Like so? http://i.imgur.com/BhPty.png
      Not a hard change to make :) At first I was thinking of making the dragon purple, as with chaos and corruption. But I wasn't sure if that's gonna be in ADOM II and red generally works for hot fiery things :P

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    2. Cool :-) Personally I love that :-)

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    3. Hmm... what would it look like if the dragon's tail didn't show up to the left of the "A" but rather kind of appeared out of it, if you know what I mean? I find the end of the tail to be annoying for some reason.

      What I mean is basically just remove the end of the tail left of the "A". And I personally don't like the multi-hue thing; the red one is more awesome in my opinion!

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    4. Very nice! Though for some reason I also always pictured the breath attack to likewise take on a Prismatic/Kaleidoscopic appearance to match.

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    5. The multi-hue is really bad looking.

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    6. Is that "really bad" as in aesthetically displeasing, or "really bad" as in 80's skater slang?

      I'm so confused :-).

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  2. Well done Ravenmore, Wojciech, and Kalle. And props to Mr. Biskup. This may sound sycophantic, but I had been wishing that the out-of-game banner (not necessarily logo) could be voted on separately, because personally, I feel exactly the same about Kalle's banner, and would love to see it remain on the site, with Wojciech's design, and Ravenmore's logo used as the actual game logo.

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  3. I also thought combining the winners would be pretty wise. Choosing one would make about 50% of the voters unhappy, combining could probably make everyone happy.

    I think Ravenmore shaping things and Mazur texturing it could be nice as it seems to be their respective strengths.

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  4. I liked Tero's submission, it's austere so being brought into a text-based game doesn't seems normal rather than an adjustment after seeing it. Others seem a bit too flowery to me, particularly Wojciech's. Not saying they're not good, I just don't think they fit.

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  5. I don't understand the use of Kalle's for the banner. Ravenmore was an overwhelming hit in that regard. Why even hold the poll? Using all three is going to look terrible and create a huge disconnect between the elements of the site. What it needs is consistency and that's not going to be delivered in this fashion.

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  6. @John: This is temporary, as mentioned in the text ;-)

    Someone (probably me... :-P ) will have to transform the graphical design into a blogger template - which is not trivial at all. So to continue to move forward I decided to do the simple thing and for now put up my preferred logo.

    If Ravenmore and Wojciech manage to to come up with a great combination this will be put up as soon as I am able to do that (or someone else offers to do a blogger template).

    For now I am happy with the website showing ADOM II instead of JADE.

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  7. @Thomas, I fear I have pretty much the same feelings of John. As a professional designer my experiences mixing up ideas from different people haven't been good. And, in general, the more coherent the graphic identity of a product is, the better it embeds itself in the mind of the target audience.

    I personally like Ravenmore's design over all the rest (and the website template could be adapted easily, and it is rather clean and nice) but whatever the style chosen, I'd stick to one and work on its strengths, rather than try to combine them all.

    Marginally, I can produce Wordpress templates, and I suppose that adapting a design to a Blogger one won't be that hard, so if you need help with that, I'll gladly contribute.

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  8. Again: I'm not trying to combine them all :-)

    Kalles design is up because it (a) was my favorite for the website and (b) getting up the final thing takes some time. I didn't see any benefit in having the old JADE stuff up on the site - it's a time of change ;-)

    As for the design proposals of Wojciech and Ravenmore... from what I hear from them the idea of combining their talents didn't really work out... so it's now Ravenmore doing a final proposal and from the previous intermediate version I saw it's gonna rock.

    In any case I'd once more like to thank Wojciech for his incredible proposal... it absolutely rocked, too, and the margin was close. So much talent out there!

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    1. Hmm, has there been any notion in your head kicking around to also update the classic ADOM slate of things down the line when the, hopefully first, new update/fix release for it arrives? Could be a good outlet for all this apparent close-ran talent you've got access to.

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