Category: Design

About a Decade ago, I build a handful of cocktail arcade cabinets with my family. Cocktail arcade cabinets are arcade cabinets where the screen faces up through a table top, and the players sit down on either side of it. We build them all from scratch with nicer materials and build quality than actual cocktail arcade cabinets.

Pictured above is an unfinished (un-stained) Ms. Pac Man cabinet. Once they were completed, we each chose different games to put in our respective cabinet. I chose to put Arkanoid and Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh. Arkanoid is a classic break-out game made by Taito in the 80’s. It’s a bit more fun than just plain-old break-out since it has power-ups, bosses, and some semblance of a storyline.

In any case, one thing that was never completed to my satisfaction was the top. I printed out some power-up keys that were found on many Arkanoid cabinets, but never thought it looked very good. I’d thought about removing the artwork all together as well. But then I decided that it would be cool to print out an actual cocktail overlay as was common in the 80’s.

Many games, such as Pac-Man, Galaga, etc. had overlays that covered the entire top of the cocktail cabinet. I’d never found an Arkanoid cabinet with nice artwork, so I whipped this together. The goal was to look retro, incorporate the actual logos, and power-up information. (Click the image to enlarge)  I’d say that I’m pretty happy with the result. The next step will be to print and cutout this design. It measures at 22″ x 32″, so It will need to be printed on a plotter, then laminated to protect it. I will post pictures of the finished result when its ready.

I like to replicate objects in vector form, particularly shiny new tech toys. But one thing I have never really tried to do is replicate old 80’s tech. Old-school beige technology is different from modern industrial design, and it seemed like it might be a fun little challenge. I decided to whip out the Apple ][ screen in vector form for fun. Below is the result.

Although it has clean lines, all the lines are all soft and beveled, in contrast to today’s predominant style of hard edges. It’s funny to see the beige and brown duotone housing as it is something that would never be produced today, however it is distinctly an Apple design as is evidenced by it’s minimal markings and functional design.

A client recently wanted a bag template that they could easily put a design on and instantly have a mock up of their packaging. I accomplished this by using meshes, gradients, different types of blends and of course masking. Here’s how I did it.

First I created an outline of the basic shape off of a photo I took of an example product. This shape will be used for quite a few things along the way.

Next I duplicated the shape, and converted it to a gradient mesh object, then used shades of grey to do a basic shading. This layer will then be multiplied onto the artwork to give the 3D look.

i then used other shapes and gradients to do some accents like the luminosity on the right. I used that first shape I made along with the pathfinder tool and new paths to make the appearance of the seal across the top. The light areas were set to screen, and the dark areas to multiply.

I then used a paper crumple texture I found online, and masked it to the first path and applied this as a multiply as well. This makes it appear less pristine and more realistic.

Finally, I made the edges appear sealed by creating a lot of dots around the edge of the bag with the blend tool, blurring them, then finally setting their blend mode to screen at 15%.

With all the  layers combined, it makes the packaging look a bit more realistic, albeit not photorealistic. I had to do this in a budgeted amount of time, and therefore couldn’t afford to get much more realistic.

So now, any graphic can be used by masking it to the first path and placing it behind all the blending layers for an instant mockup. Here is a fake sample product design I whipped up in 2 minutes to demonstrate since an NDA prevents me from revealing the product I was really working.