Inspiration on Design - A Guest Post from Our Lead Artist

I asked Mirkov Sasa what inspired his great art for Conspiracy! Here's what he had to say"

"Hi all of you people on this great site, the man in charge for what we all believe will be next great thing in the TCG market has asked me to share some thoughts on the logo design process for the five fighting factions that are involved in the fight for supremacy on Earth. If you have not guessed by now, I am talking about CONSPIRACY!, our, and I really mean OUR great project!

Where to start, maybe I should talk about what logos really mean? No, I would like that to be a mystery and leave that to your imagination (there is really a story behind every single logo for each faction, believe it or not). Instead, I will try to share some of my inspiration for them, what has influenced me to make them.

This is rather difficult, more difficult than I first thought it would be. I mean I am supposed to explain my inspiration about the design for a game, but then again that game has been my inspiration all the way! Yes, the logos I have made for the game have been really inspired by game itself and by all of your posts explaining the game. As a designer, my job is to find most suitable, sense-making piece of art that looks good (well at least that is what I have learned in academy). So I tried to follow all of your leads and make faction logos as close to what I thought were your wishes as possible. Another thing is that I have always wanted to do this kind of work, after I had just finished a PC game project this was a really refreshing and nice thing to be working on. So after careful analysis of your posts, logos for factions were born, and after more of your posts some of them have been corrected, so as much of a credit is mine for them it is also yours. So I would really like to use this opportunity to express my thanks for all of You that have been providing me with feedback on designs. Also, your support for the project and talking about factions themselves have been a great helper for design. So if you are reading this hoping to find some X-Files, Star Trek or whatever influenced me, then I must disappoint you, because story and really well defined factions were all of the guide lines I needed and all of inspiration I needed as well.

Well after this crushing of all "I used this logo as a reminder of ..." hopes, how would you like to know what software I used? If you are interested, keep reading, if not, wait for my next post where I will be pleading for your help. First I would like to point out that ANY software could be used to create this graphic but my choice are:

Maestro, drums please.....

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator (I hope Adobe will read this and give me some money for making their products look good :-) )

Well logos were completely done in Illustrator, templates for cards were made using both Photoshop and Illustrator. Why do I use these applications? Well first they are best ones on the market (now they really must give me some cash :-) ). I know to use them really well and they can copy/paste stuff between them without any saving or loss of quality.

Since any kind of tutorial would really take a LOT of space here, I will just say that if any of you have any questions regarding any of these two applications, feel free to give me a nudge on MSN and I will try to help you all best I can. What you really need to know is that Photoshop is a raster based application, and Illustrator is a vector based application, everything else needs a little more digging into them, but there are lot of free starter tutorials on the net including some on the official Adobe site.

Hope that I have not bored you all with this and hope that some of you will continue to support this project and maybe invite some more people into this. After all, I am looking forward beating you all in this game once it is finished :-)

Best wishes to you all, sincerely yours: Mirkov Sasa"