Illustrapedia

What's behind door number 2

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:15:00 +0200

I loved doing these 100 little hints of what Illustrapedia is supposed to be: a nicely illustrated collection of knowledge bytes done in casual, easily understandable style.

Retronator as a company is today exactly 1 year old, but in reality I earn my living as a game developer at Dawn of Play. I do projects like Illustrapedia in my free time and it’s just one of the interesting things I want to work on. But it’s my growing wish to make a living out of it, which would mean my work creates real value for the world. And the world - is you!

I’ve narrowed down my ideas to 3 projects and behind door number 2 is exactly this one:

Illustrapedia

I would love to hear if you’d like to see Illustrapedia become a real illustrated encyclopedia. I’ve talked about my vision for it and if this project is chosen, I will create a prototype with the first few entries to exactly present how this would all look like. I’m talking big pixel art illustrations and text that really explains what’s going on there. So a lot of neat pixels that teach real knowledge. If this is your thing, please let me know.

Or:

I’ve put up a voting box on my Facebook page, or reply on my main blog.

Countdown finished, stand by for instructions

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:33:39 +0200

Retropolis The city of the future, the home of Retronator

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:00:06 +0200

Retropolis

The city of the future, the home of Retronator

99 down, 1 to go

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:29:00 +0200

We’re almost there. Tomorrow is the day when this beginning comes to an end. Because the day after tomorrow is the start of the real Illustrapedia.

If you haven’t figured by now, Illustrapedia is supposed to be a real illustrated encyclopedia. These small pixels are only a tiny hint of what I want to create. But why create an encyclopedia? We have Wikipedia, How Stuff Works, Encyclopædia Britannica. And the answer is: because they focus on text while I (and a lot of people out there, especially kids) work best with images.

Nicely illustrated encyclopedias were where my head was at throughout my childhood. They fueled my imagination, broadened my horizons and gave me a million ideas of what kind of computer games I want to make. But not all educational children’s books are the same. I’ve developed a taste for them and when I browse through many on today’s shelves I don’t find the same charm that were in the ones I had.

Let me illustrate what I am talking about.

The bad

My parents apparently had incredibly good taste in what books to buy. But one day I got a children’s encyclopedia about minerals as a gift from somewhere else. It looked something like this modern example:

A bunch of photos from various sources slapped together. Let’s just say it didn’t capture my imagination. I see this all over. Books about history that have images of fossils instead of an illustration of the times in which they were created. Collections of archaeological objects don’t tell the story to a kid! It’s your job as the author to use your expertise to show that story to them.

It’s the same in science. You think a mix of photos you bought on iStock will make me want to become an astronaut? Think again. But I did spend my childhood turning a page after page of a great book about space, imagining flying the space shuttle or landing on the moon. Which brings me to …

The good

Hello, art direction! It seems in the 80s people still payed great illustrators to work their magic and create books with gorgeous illustrations. And I would say the above example is from the least imaginative form my childhood. Here’s a nice piece about the roman army from my childhood:

Don’t show me what old pieces of crap you dug up, let me see what actually happened in those times! It’s why I loved playing Ceasar II: seeing an actual roman city in front of my eyes. Even better, I was actually building it myself, learning about their way of life, economy and such.

Here’s a recent example of an imaginative way to teach history. It’s what a newspaper would look like, if it would be written in those times. I picked it up recently, which leaves me some hope.

But where it all really started, where I got the main influence for how I want Illustrapedia to look like, was this set of 6 books from the end of the 70s. They were titled in the sense of “What is this?”, “Where is it?”, “How does it work?” and “What should I become?”. They were more proper encyclopedias with 500 entries each and answered questions about nature, Earth, great people, technology and even what job you can do when you grow up. Each entry featured a big illustration in a coherent style, a title and the description in various levels of details.

As a kid I would browse through all 6 volumes again and again. It’s where I gained my first interest in science and what planted a seed of curiosity and thirst for knowledge that easily kept me engaged in school.

While I love Wikipedia for the gains it gives me to me as an adult student, I don’t see a big textual work full of convoluted scientific words engaging younger generations just as well as carefully edited illustrated encyclopedias with great art direction did in the past.

That’s why I want to make Illustrapedia.

Pickaxe from Minecraft, rotated to fit

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:06:06 +0200

Pickaxe

from Minecraft, rotated to fit

98 down, 2 to go

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 02:55:00 +0200

Shit, the days are coming down fast. Today I wanted to share something more personal. Don’t worry, I obscured my naked pictures so it’s totally safe for work!

Here’s a little something from my creative process. After getting an idea for an object I would usually start by finding reference photos on Google image search. Even though it might seem that you can’t get any details into a 30 by 30 pixel art image, having a real life reference makes a big difference. Sometimes, however, I would get inspiration directly from things around me and draw them with the object directly in front of my eyes. These are 4 such sources of inspiration.

1. The room

The lava lamp is an obvious example and you can know it’s special to me since I use it as this tumblr’s avatar. It also provided my life with great mood lighting, especially when girls were staying over.

The Chinese flat hand fan is another piece of interior decoration that made it into my pixel collection.

2. The office

When I registered Retronator as an official company those 363 days ago I moved my PC from my room (that’s the big tower under the lava lamp in the previous picture) to an office of an old warehouse. Over that summer, my friends would turn the place into a sports center called Urban Roof, while I was busy in the office creating their webpage.

To liven up the place, I bought a cornstalk dracaena to liven up the place and give me hope that one day I will work under a real palm tree. The manager of Urban Roof brought in the second pixeled object from my office, the solar-powered desk lamp.

3. The art supplies

I knew a picture of me naked with my pens would come in handy one day. Besides the Prismacolor art marker and Pilot G2 gel ink pen I also hold a Faber-Castell liner that I used for most comic style drawings I did at the end of high school.

4. The city I live(d) in

I immensely enjoyed drawing the buildings in this countdown, something I would like to do more of and maybe make a dedicated project for. While I couldn’t directly go paint the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, I did manage to pixel two buildings in Ljubljana. I lived there for 8 years. Up until yesterday, when I moved out of the room, took my little palm tree out of the office and left Slovenia’s capital.

It is a beautiful city and the summer days I spent in the park next to a condominium behind the railway station or across the street of a church near the office will never be forgoten.

Good bye, Ljubljana, these really are days of change in my life. And see you guys tomorrow, before the final piece of the puzzle.

Reverse squiggly One of the seven tetrominoes

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 20:01:06 +0200

Reverse squiggly

One of the seven tetrominoes

Pretzel A type of baked food in a unique knot-like shape,...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:01:07 +0200

Pretzel

A type of baked food in a unique knot-like shape, originating in Europe

96 down, 4 to go

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:23:00 +0200

When I decided to take on this project I had to choose the right tool to do it. If I wanted to be serious about keeping the daily schedule I needed to have the option to draw at any free time of the day. I don’t have a computer at home so this was a great excuse to use my iPad.

I already fantasized about creating my own pixel art program (I make iOS games for a living), but thankfully got to my senses when I found an absolutely amazing app that was all I hoped for: Sprite Something.

It’s by Matthew Klundt of Terrible Games and he’s doing the best job with Sprite Something. Matt even got in contact with me and implemented some features that further eased my production of Illustrapedia. It’s the kind of customer service that I think will win over in this decade and with new features coming up (soon, Matt?) it’s a steal at $2.99 in the iTunes AppStore.

Today I finished all but the last final piece (I queue a few of them up in advance). All together, it was a long road, but oh so pleasant one. Drawing these on the iPad I had the luxury of taking the drawing board out in the park or doing a piece or two before sleep in bed. In the end, all but 2 pieces were finger painted in Sprite Something, with the exceptions done with Wacom on my office PC.

See you again after the next two. Thanks, Matt, and you, readers!

Self-retracting Tape measure A flexible form of ruler

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:00:00 +0200

Self-retracting

Tape measure

A flexible form of ruler

3 bedroom House in cutaway view

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:13:30 +0200

3 bedroom

House

in cutaway view

Coca-Cola A carbonated soft drink sold in more than 200...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:09:06 +0200

Coca-Cola

A carbonated soft drink sold in more than 200 countries

93 down, 7 to go

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:09:00 +0200

I was sitting on a plane flight to Seattle, designing my personal webpage. It was November 2007.

Many of my thought processes start with a mind map in my notebook. This was no exception. I was rounding up what I want to tell with my online presence, but more deeply, I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

It’s no surprise the answer lied withing the realms of computer games. However, my view of them was slowly shifting from pure entertainment to a vision of a medium with the biggest potential for creativity and innovation to cultivate in great educational products. I always valued games that broadened my horizons and I saw this is an obvious extension of something else: as a kid I really loved illustrated encyclopedias.

You see, it wasn’t all supposed to be just little random things with cute sentences on the side. I had this all planned back in November 2007. I was going to do an encyclopedia, but not a gigantic work like Wikipedia. It would be focused on illustrations in a coherent style, with the essence of the matter explained in plain English instead of convoluted scientific terms. It was going to be named Ilustropedia.

And so I sketched, on that plane flight, a title for my work, drawn from many little objects. For years it remained just a page in my sketchbook. Until early 2011, when I stumbled upon Jessica Hische’s Daily Drop Cap. It immediately brought me back to that November, reminding me how much fun I had figuring those letters out.

An email later Jessica said she didn’t mind me starting a similar project and even helped me settle on the final name. I already figured the correct spelling of illustration, but was glad to get a second opinion from a native speaker on Illustropedia versus Illustrapedia.

I registered the domain soon after and on March 6th the first of 100 random things that spell Illustrapedia were published. The rest, as they say, is history. Or maybe not. Because as this countdown nears to an end I am reminded it was counting down to something. All this was done in hopes to get me back into illustration, pixel art, self-discipline and all the rest I would need to really make this project what I wanted it to be.

Saddam HusseinOsama Bin Laden Internet Explorer

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 20:00:06 +0200

~~Saddam Hussein~~
~~Osama Bin Laden~~

Internet Explorer

Bow saw A metal-framed saw used for cross-cutting branches down...

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 20:07:06 +0200

Bow saw

A metal-framed saw used for cross-cutting branches down to size

Anarchy Absence of enforced political authority

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:24:28 +0200

Anarchy

Absence of enforced political authority

Half-pipe from 1987 Epyx’ California Games on the Amiga

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:01:06 +0200

Half-pipe

from 1987 Epyx’ California Games on the Amiga

Manfred von Richthofen (Red Baron)’s Fokker Dr.I Triplane

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:00:06 +0200

Manfred von Richthofen (Red Baron)’s Fokker Dr.I

Triplane

Dollar sign A symbol primarily used to indicate the various...

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:01:06 +0200

Dollar sign

A symbol primarily used to indicate the various peso and dollar units of currency

87 down, 13 to go

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:39:00 +0200

We’re passing the apex of the final bend that will take us into the home straight. The last 12 have been a breeze as soon as I settled in my new location. I’m visiting my parents over summer to finish my last exams, write a bachelor’s thesis and graduate.

So onto the next 6, while I also figure out if I want to say anything meaningful in the final text posts.

P.S. Since I got quite the hang of this post something every day thing I started another, but shorter project in parallel. It’s a collection of short stories that will last for about 20 days. I’ve finished the cover and began publishing it yesterday on my personal blog. It’s called The Little Black Book (of growing up and falling in love).