Magnetic Travel Games

About a year and a half ago I helped rebrand these Magnetic Travel Games for Barnes and Noble and I'm going to share some of the process.

Here is one of the games- there were four of them, Hangman, Chess, Checkers and oddly enough, Tic Tac Toe (which I recall was the best seller of the 4- which still comes to a shock to me).

As you can see just about anything I would do would be better than the existing art.

Since they're are of a set, the backgrounds would change but the foreground element would stay the same.

Planes Trains and Automobiles was WAY too busy, so I simplified down to just the car.

I also thought there was an opportunity to add another dimension to the game by giving the players an opportunity to mix and match attributes of the person they're hanging- there's plenty of room on the die to add character parts- this all turned a little tricky cause no one wants to hang a nice guy. Everyone hates zombies so I first considered making a couple different zombies you could hang instead of the stick figure of the original version of this game.

At this point the feedback I was getting was we needed more of a "travel character", the car wasnt character enough so I started generating a series of possible character designs to present to the client.

What says Magnetic Travel? A magnet? A globe?

Can we change the accessories to fit that character into each of the game types? 

Not a great response on the Magnet guy, so I came up with a few more..

... and picked the ones I liked and showed how they would translate across the different game types.

Not a great response on the kids, not saying travel enough apparently, so we settled on going back to 

the family car out on vacation.

Each of the Games needed its own unique font colors, so thats when I did a series of color combos for each game and font- here above are some of the options for the Hangman.

One thing that came up at this point was the needed to add a Chocking Hazard Warning label which is actually pretty specific in how big it needs to be and where its displayed. Pretty tricky trying to figure out which Government Department handles those regulations but figured it out and attempted to decipher the legal documents guidelines. Would of helped if I had a law degree but managed to decode what they needed to have. Like I said- it was very specific.

Ack! Totally messed up our composition adding that! Everything was fitting well until now. No biggeee though- we just did what we could to fit it in, besides with our manufacturing deadline quickly passing us there wasn't time to go back and get all new artwork approved.

Still hemming and hawing over who the characters we were going to hang were going to be. When my sister and I were kids we would draw a hangman game on paper and customize the characters- it was the best part of the game. These are a few of the characters -and also just making sure the parts would fit on the playing board. which was the inside of the game tin.

And heres the final Hangman art- the other 4 games, Chess, Checkers and Tic Tac Toe are all on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, $8.95 I think- so next time youre wandering the game isles at Barnes, take a gander. They came out looking pretty slick with the blister backing and fitted plastic blister- at some point I will update this image with an actual photograph of one of the games, but it looks almost exactly like this!