Блоги: заметки с тегом games

The Journey into Color

Robert — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:36:17 +0500

The Giracolore is a spin-art machine pertaining to the new popular tradition of Italian toys:

Raffaele Cesano, the Giracolore’s creator, asked me to make a book with its history and practical uses.

“The Journey into Color” (Il viaggio nel colore) is now the first book I have fully designed, and perhaps even my biggest design work yet. Its copies now come with every device put on sale.

The client

Raffaele is a schoolteacher-turned-toymaker. He’s especially good at crafting traditional toys and games, like spinning tops, smol carousels, and wooden acrobats. He is fascinated with color in motion.

Process

Raffaele first gave me a bunch of material: pictures, informational texts, and stories. Some things would be repeated across four different texts, but each one would have something useful of its own. I read them all and then wove them into a fluent narrative. Every now and then, I would meet Raffaele to refine the text together. I also took some disc pics myself.

I learned a lot about book design while working on this. For example:

The placement of punctuation and line breaks affects legibility. A line break at the wrong syllable can make a word appear to be a different one.
Consistency in punctuation colors and weights is a science of its own!

Outcome

I chose a 13×18 cm format for the book so it would fit perfectly into the Giracolore’s 13.5×19 cm box. Nothing is arbitrary here: the disc on the cover is the size of a real one. I made sure each spread had at least some color.

The imprint page and its adjacent table of contents are stunning: the gradient title, the rare NB ligature, the Italian cockade (which looks like a Giracolore disc!), the frame…

The book begins with a short introduction to the Giracolore and proceeds with spin-art’s history. Notice the alignment of the words “bellezza” on the left page:

The book then delves into color psychology:

And culminates with stories metaphorically illustrated with the Giracolore. Here’s one of them, The Little Blonde Girl, with the parallelism principle at work:

Some pages encourage to make one’s own disc and glue it in:

The book ends with an invitation to take a look at Raffaele’s other projects and to contact him:

The book is set in three styles of Apfel Grotesk: Regular, Fett, and Brukt (for the “stick your disc here” label).

Conclusion

The book is the best introduction to the Giracolore, vividly showing the device’s value for children, teachers, artists, storytellers, and therapists.

Good design is never boring.

The client’s review

Robert has visually arranged The Journey into Color with great success and has helped me introduce it to the public.

Robert has various qualities: his youthful energy gave me confidence to express what I felt. I had fun letting him do his thing, letting him express and interpret my ideas. Everyone has the right to play the game they enjoy the most.

The result is what I wanted.

I initially hesitated to pay in advance, but during the course of the work, I saw Robert’s reliability firsthand.

Enjoy the colors!

Luck

Robert — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 02:14:01 +0500

Robert:

Luck does not exist. Quoting Ron Swanson, luck is a concept invented by the weak to explain their failures.

There is, however, a cause for every effect, and an effect for every cause.

What is referred to as beginner’s luck is an invitation to continue the journey. I won my first-ever game of Go despite playing against a world champion doing his best.

The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths, and even more so on a supposedly lucky day: it is probabilistically unlikely to have multiple yuge unrelated events happen in a day. Althô I do suppose that one’s spiritual energy field reaching a certain frequency can make it more probable. Trust your gut.

Playing Wordle

Robert — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 01:29:30 +0500

Robert:

I started playing Wordle a week ago. Fun game!

Wordle 561 3/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

E-sports

Robert — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 18:42:26 +0500

Robert:

Gaming, something that many believe to be a waste of time, is being rebranded as e-sports, something that sounds prestigious.

This rebranding, along with the creation of high-quality shooter games, is what it takes to have young people (unknowingly) commit to the future of warcraft.

Future wars, after all, will be fought remotely to avoid casualties. Watch closely: today’s Fortnite champions will be tomorrow’s robot-commanding generals. Ernest Cline’s novel Armada was a prophecy.

Randomness in games

Robert — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 17:56:45 +0500

Robert:

Games with an element of randomness are more fun to play than those without: the player who made a bad strategic mistake gets a chance to escape the spiral of loss.

My favorite strategy game

Robert — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 14:04:10 +0500

Robert:

My favorite strategy game is one from real life: finding ways to get around restrictions.