Since I play on MODO more regularly than before which was more of 'rarely' I needed a site to check on prices.
I started using MTGGoldfish to see the prices of a larger amount of cards because it might actually be the only site that does it for free and does it FAST. With time I started using the site for more things. I added some decklists I wanted to share in a text form (because it clearly shows the prices in tix and one can see price of each card at once). Later I ventured on and read some of the statistics articles and became hooked. I don't usually read Magic articles unless it is something very strange usually not talking about Magic but rather about its players/community, psychology, sociology and such. But when seeing numbers and reading some of the analysis I realized that this is something my brain can actually work with and that it actually interests me (even though the interpretation of the data is a completely different matter)MTG Goldfish has become a site I have opened in my browser most of the time and I actually check the new content. I still do not watch Magic videos but I might actually start doing that. I sometimes watch games on MODO so I don't see a problem why I couldn't watch something that was actually screen captured for that purpose (so people could watch that)
One of the things that I actually like about MTGGoldfish is the fact that it is mostly plain text and shows all the data well unlike other sites (and exports decklists in plain text!). So if someone decides to make the site more graphically pleasing I hope this clarity will be maintained. (the site owner is certainly someone who knows what he wants and can formulate what he wants).
One day while browsing the site I accidentally clicked on some link and I ended up on MTGGoldfish Facebook page. I clicked on 'Like' because they deserve it and then noticed that they were looking for a graphics designer. Which certainly seemed strange since their site looks the way it looks like (no offence, I like it). So I decided to sent them an email with something like my portfolio and see if they would contant me (that forced me to update it and I felt pretty badly afterwards as I don't really have much to show).
A bit later I received an email asking me if I could do what they envision. I found out that what they plan to do is have some nice visualization of decks that they can post on FB, Instagram etc.
I decided to do it no matter what they give me. It sounded as a good idea. During the process of coming up with a layout and design I certainly learned few things (since I really did not expect doing graphs and using zillion of layers...).
I wanted to do the first draft functional and I wanted to have an idea how something like a visual deck view (infographics actually) could look like and I wanted to keep the MTGGOldfish orange color present. It turned out functional but not 'awesome' or anything. The second draft was an attempt to make it look better - in terms of visually pleasing. But I struggled a lot with showing the data. I was trying to figure out what kind of graphs could be used and what graphs wouldn't look dull. The second draft wasn't good enough but it lead me to the final draft which finally started looking nice and flashy (actually a fourth one). Textures and graphics (icons, charts) were added. That is something I was doing seperately in Illustrator/Photoshop and took most of the time. Later it was about figuring out how to make it look coherent. In the end the simplest solution showed up to be the best and the infographic view for MTGGoldfish was created.
So I thank MTGGoldfish for letting me do this and hope that you - players - enjoy it. Even though I wasn't really fan of this idea at first (I like text you see...) I changed my mind later. It is convenient and looks pretty cool and after some changes someone at MTGGoldfish did it looks even better.
Draft no. 1
No comments:
Post a Comment