Stylized Card

I just had an interesting new thought about Dangerous Apples' graphic design. For one of my school assignments, I am using DA's card background graphic in an Adobe Illustrator file. I had to convert this graphic, which is raster-based, into a vector-based format so Illustrator could rotate it. At one point during the conversion, I accidentally left the number of colors to use at 6 instead of using the maximum 256 colors. It sounds like it could've been a disaster, but I actually really liked the results.

For the purpose of comparison, here's the original graphic that I drew next to the graphic that Illustrator produced:



I really like the second one. It just seems to be a lot more organic. It has a lot of subtle variations and assymetries in the thickness and shape of lines, and even the placement of elements. The shadow and highlight on the apple look really great too. Even though it's a lot fewer colors, it looks really good and stylized that way. I think it fits the theme of the game as a fun, almost cartoony diversion. I'd love to see the card logo animated too, maybe the stem does a little dance and the highlight bounces up and down in rhythm.

Now I'm not about to go changing the page design again. I've already given it one facelift before it was even finished, and I plan on leaving it at that. But it's something to think about for the future. I also have to say that as great as this looks, it's not good for my ego that I just got out-arted by a piece of software, despite how much time and effort I put into my own attempt. (However, it could be argued that the software itself did nothing, it was only guided by my skillful and judicious hand. I'm going to take that interpretation and run with it.)