The video above shows off the new and original Skins designed for the Eve War For New Eden board game. If you backed the game on Kickstarter you will be getting the code for these inside the core box when the game ships. I'm sure these skins will become highly sought after over the coming years.
T'amber created the skins you see in the video above and I helped, I guess more accurately you can say I Art Directed. We worked together to figure out what the essential design elements would be and how best to convey the board game graphically. Primarily through the hexagons.
The biggest challenge for me was to create something that identified the game on the skins. Without some kind of mark or logo, the skins would just be nice skins. The issue was that there is no logo for the board game, it is just the Eve logo with words under it. You might not realize this, but if you just put a typeface on the side of a ship it looks horrible. Horrid. Unacceptable. We even considered various ways to animate holograms for it.
I even created a whole series of animation tests of various states of distressed logos. But eventually we decided on a single unifying graphic that would identify the game. Which is when I started designing something that would not look like a logo (because the game didn't have one) but also not look like a typeface stuck on the side of the ships. I also wanted it to fit within the in-game vibe and look like something that would be part of Eve Online.
And that is the origin of the War For New Eden graphic that is on each of the skins. In case anyone wanted to know.