Testing a different illustration style

With version 2 of Deadly Furry Cute well underway I decide to break with tradition and try a new illustration style. Now with dire results!

OK so the results weren’t that dire – as you can see below – but they weren’t as good as the first run through.

What I was trying to do by changing the illustration style for DFC was speed up my working process and enable me to have some assets that weren’t flat to use for other media types – website, t-shirts etc.  We’ll not talk about how much time I’ve lost ‘trying’ this. Instead we’ll skip ahead. Where in fact the opposite has happened. I’d created illustrations that worked well as a website asset but didn’t at all lend themselves to the flat nature of the toys I was creating.

Now I don’t make these decisions on a whim. I’ve made test toys, printed, cutout and built them as well as shown test audiences the new style. The test group was unanimous: while they did like the design, they didn’t think the toys were as cute or worked as well as the original style.

So I went back to the people who make the toys you and looked at the feedback you gave on the first set of toys. The wording there was also unanimous: you loved them.

So I’m now going to design the new toys the way I did the original first set, flat on the templates. I’ll also be using the same style of illustration as the originals – you liked it, I liked it, my test group liked it. Why ruin a good thing.

I will say this though. Without the process of trying something new, testing it and finding out you were already doing it right I’d have never known – not truly in my heart.  It’s one of the reasons I love design and it’s process: getting things wrong is just as important as getting it right. And it highlights one of my motto’s ‘test, test, test and test again’.

Some examples of the tested illustration style follow. Only one made it from paper to test illustration but I thought you’d like to see the sketches for all three.

Deadly sketch

Furry sketch

Cute sketch

Deadly test illustration

This article has been re-posted from designergamergeek.com with permission from the author.

Tags: deadlyfurrycute, illustration, paper, testing, Toys, update Monday, May 18th, 2009