I love the blog, you guys are making great progress! Thanks again, and keep up the good work 🙂

This was actually based on something that I observed when looking at different product designs, trying to reverse engineer why different designs look good. Because I’m a graphic designer by background I tried to center what I was observing with gun design into what I know about graphic design.

In graphic design we have this thing called a grid system. The grid is a way for designers to align columns of text, images, and other graphical elements onto a design so everything fits (grid systems are usually 12 or 18 columns on a page with a gutter between them). For some reason our minds like alignments and mathematical proportions, so when doing designing a page layout we are always thinking about how things align to each other.

Page layouts almost always have a grid of parallel and perpendicular lines because text is a series of parallel lines, but for logos, scene compositions, and props we can break out of parallel and perpendicular guides and into the realm of triangles and curves. Same thing applies to a pose. We do lines of action and gesture drawings before moving on to a finished illustration to see if we like what we are communicating with our angles and alignments. With scenes we’ll draw a series of curves and straight lines (more or less depending on how we want the scene to feel), and then we move on from there. So I did the same exact thing with the gun (although with the gun I started with the silhouette first just to get my mind going).

By drawing on top of other (real world) gun designs that I liked, I could carry the lines of the gun design out so I could see those guidelines. To me it felt like the gun designs had lots straight angles, angles that converged to the tip of the gun, probably to visually communicate that the weapon is accurate. I noticed that angles for the grip and other parts of the gun that make it ergonomic, often converged upon other parts of the gun that had an ergonomic function. And when I hid the photo layer in Photoshop and saw only the guidelines, just the guidelines themselves looked interesting as if the guidelines were intended to be beautiful on their own.

So I looked at that and went, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and tried it myself. That’s what gave me the idea to try that, to try and create a design of guidelines that visually communicated a modern accurate weapon, and looked interesting, and that process worked out pretty well. It’s about trying to find alignments in the design, where angles converge, and if you like the statement that the converging angles make. It’s gesture and line-of-action from character design and posing applied to prop design.

It’s kind of crazy how all these unrelated fields of scene composition, graphic design, characters, and props all relate to each other. 🙂