Planet Bob - Colony 7: Birth of a label

RSS Bot · November 19, 2007

Hi there!

Since I always like Nathans features regarding certain labels he created, I thought to once present such a "making of..." from a programmers point of view as well. So with Daves permission I can here show the way from a small scribble to the final Colony 7 label. And there's even a picture riddle coming in the end!

DISCLAIMER: Dave created this label in the highest possible resolution, using like a million dpi and more shades of color than the human eye can resolve. Instead of these GB sized files, all you get to see here is brutally butchered down to 200K JPGs. So, please don't blame Dave on this, and rest assured that the label will get printed in the best quality possible!!

Ok, so it all started less than three weeks ago, when I approached Dave, asking him wether he can do yet another label for me, for Colony 7.

When he agreed, as usual I threw tons of source material his way, like KLOV links, the Arcade Flyers, the most recent binary, the artwork of Atlantis and Terra Attack, and a Sci-Fi cover of a CD.

We quickly agreed on using the original logo, talked some about Dan Dare Comics, B-Movies and Moebius. Star Wars as well. We always end up talking about Star Wars :lol:

Out of principle I also asked him to do something different than Atlantis and Terra Attack - and Dave agreed to approach the theme from a different angle.

Finally I told him about a speciality of the Arcade, that it only uses a very basic color set made out of one red, one yellow, one green, etc. and he thought that it was a very cool idea to adopt this limitation for the label as well.

A few days later, he presented me a first scribble:

I thought it was a very good idea, but I was missing the trademark bubble which is part of all my labels. Only an hour later, Dave had this additional requirement realized:

Besides that we were discussing the shields in the game a bit and I thought the label should better not show them; they're red and yellow in the game, just like the logo itself, so I feared it'd clash with it.

Only one more week and Dave has me totally blown away with another amazing scribble-turning-into-reality wonder:

Now, at first I thought it was perfect, but staring at it on a TFT for an hour made me aware of a little oddity. It was probably just me, but nevertheless, Dave tweaked it a little and now I think it is perfect!

So for the quiz part, see if you spot the 2 differences and try if you can imagine why they were made:

:lolblue: