Design Summary
I recently did a FOSS project for my portfolio website so I figured it was time to try out the Affinity suite of programs. Unlike Adobe the Affinity programs are available for a one time fee, which I took advantage of a sale a month or so ago at writing. I wanted to make a project using these programs as a way to get familiar with them, so I fired up my tried and true Sharpen and pulled the prompt to design a Mousepad for Rockstar Games.
The Process
The process wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, it wasn’t as painful as the FOSS programs I used back in the business card for a UK gym project. There is a reason that the Affinity suite of programs are the biggest competitors to Adobe. Anyway, getting started I decided to create a mood board of what Rockstar Games means to me. Knee jerk reaction would be just to create something related to their cash cows GTA and Red Dead Redemption, which I used, but I also wanted to include favorites of mine such as Max Payne (in this case Max from Max Payne 3) and the Midnight Club games from the PS2 era. From there I found some reference images and took the characters from them using the selection brush and the masking tool on Affinity photo to create the character PNGs.
Mood Board
Reference Image 1
Reference Image 2
Reference Image 3
Reference Image 4
Final
After I got the characters in the poses I wanted and their PNGs all cut out, I assembled them together with the Rockstar logo on Affinity Designer to create a nice photo montage of some of Rockstar Games most famous characters. From here, I found a nice mouse pad mockup file and popped my design into it. I was really worried how the use of mockups (especially ones downloaded as PSDs) would react with Affinity photo, but it was nice and painless. I really like using these programs and I hope the design industry as a whole can start to shift to different programs away from the pseudo monopoly that Adobe currently has.
