Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1100: Designing to Art

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Most of the time, we create the card design before we commission the art, but not always. In this podcast, I walk through when art comes before design and when we have to design to the art.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is based on a question from my blog. So the question was, do we design for art? Meaning, do we design cards, like, how often do we see art and then from the art design a card? The answer is not a lot, but not never. I've come up with five different ways that we designed art. So today I'm going to explain the process a little bit and then get into what those five examples are and then talk about how exactly Dewey designed art. That's today's topic. Okay, so before I get into how... Let me talk about how we normally do the process,

and then I'll get into the exception, because designing for art is the exception. Okay, so normally the way a magic set works is in exploratory design, vision design, set design, we design cards. And at some point, set design, we have what we call art waves. In set design, there's numerous art waves. It depends how big the set is.

There's usually at least two, sometimes more, depending on the set and how much art is needed. So what happens is set design is coming up to an art wave. So what they need to do first is they have to tag cards to say, these are cards that we're ready to get art for. And then we do what's called card concepting. So it's a meeting between someone from the creative team, who's the card conceptor, the art director, the lead designer for set

design, sometimes the editor, and occasionally there could be a few other people. And the idea is you look at the card, see what it does, mechanically what it does, and then you have to figure out, okay, well, creatively, what does that mean? You know, let's say you have a direct damage spell. Okay, well, how are they doing damage? Is it with fire? Is it with sound? Is it with earth? Are you throwing objects at them? Like, what exactly?

Yeah, it's direct damage, but physically, how are you doing the direct damage? And also the card concept, you're getting the general sense of what are we showing? Are we showing the spell being used? Are we showing the spell affecting something? You know, is it a creature? Like what, what exactly, what are we focusing on? What is the art about? Now we'd like to give the artist some latitude. We don't, we don't like tell them exactly how to draw it, but it's more of like, here's the scene we're capturing, you know, do your best to capture this scene. the scene we're capturing, you know, do your best to capture this scene. And we have what we call a style guide or a world guide, and that the art director, when they make the art descriptions,

can say, hey, this character is dressed in the costume you will see on this page, or using a weapon you will see on this page, or maybe using a style of art that you'll find on this page. That there's a lot of work that goes into world building, visual work, that then can be used when the art director is talking to the artist. Okay, so most of the time, that is how art gets made. Meaning, the mechanics of the card are figured out ahead of time. The art is crafted to make sense of what the card is doing mechanically. That is the normal process.

That is how, you know, 99% of cards are probably made. Mechanics first, art second. And the reason for that is mechanics are not as flexible as art. Art is very flexible. Mechanics, it has some flexibility, but it is not as flexible as art. So the idea of trying to let the artist match what the spell does just ends up with the best overall sort of card.

But, there are five examples that I can come up with today where you have to, what we call, design to art. And what design to art means is the card is not finished, you have a piece of art, and you have to make sure the design you're making

is complementing the art that exists. Okay, so number one way that this will happen is, let's say it's time for the first art wave, and the lead designer is picking the cards they want to do. Normally what you want to do is you want to pick cards we're confident in, right? You want to pick cards that I don't think this card is going to change. But one of the tricks we've learned over the years is sometimes you have an element in your set. For example, let's say you know who your planeswalker is or you have characters that you know. You might have things that you haven't designed yet, but you know what the art is going to be. For example, a planeswalker, the ratio for planeswalkers fills the whole card

because you can see through the text box. And a planeswalker usually isn't in the middle of doing something. They're more posed. And we know what our planeswalkers look like. So if you know you have a planeswalker in your set, which most sets do, having your planeswalker be on your first art wave makes sense

even if you haven't quite figured out what the card is going to do yet. The only thing you have to commit to on a Planeswalker is whether, because it changes the Art Ratio, whether it's a 3-ability Planeswalker or a 4-ability Planeswalker. You have to know that. You have to commit to that. Also, sometimes you're doing stories,

and you have certain characters that you know we're going back to, and we know what the characters look like. And so, sometimes you'll do that. In Universes Beyond, because we're going back to. And we know what the characters look like. And so sometimes you'll do that. In universes beyond, because we're doing a property that has known things, sometimes we're like, well, we know we're doing this person, this object, this place. We haven't quite figured out how, but no matter what we do, it's going to look like this person, this object, this place. It's going to look like that thing. So sometimes art is commissioned before the card because we know

exactly what the art will look like. In those cases, when the card comes in, you have to design. Now, most of the time, this category is a lot like doing top-down design. Whether or not the art exists, you kind of know what it looks like. Sorry, does that hurt me? Double because it hurts. So most of the time, like I said, it's a top-down. You know what the thing looks like. So you're not that committed to the art in the sense that it's not, you would make what you're going to make whether the art existed or not, most of the time.

Sometimes, though, when you get the art back, the artist has done something, or there's something that the artist has done that might just push you in a direction. That there's a little look in the eye of the character, or maybe they're casting a spell or something in which it just, maybe they're doing something that just

slightly pushes you in a certain direction. As you'll see in other categories, there's a lot more influence. But it is possible if the art exists first and you're designing to it, you know, you might, the mood or tone of the art might influence how you do the design. So that is category number one. So category number two. So the way it works is the art director gives the artist a card. I think they have, it used to be seven weeks.

I'm not sure if it's still seven weeks, but roughly seven weeks. And then partway through, about halfway through, the artist has to turn in a sketch. And what that means is it's just kind of showing the composition of the piece. Some artists will turn in multiple sketches. Here's a couple different ways I could do it. Do you like one or the other? The reason that there's a sketch is just to make sure that everyone's on the same page, that the art director and the artist sort of like what's going on. If there's anything that's sort of contradictory to what's happening,

you know, the art director can give notes or other people on the creative team or even the lead designer can give notes. I mean, the art director can give notes or other people on the creative team or even the lead designer can give notes. I mean, the art director is the one that gives the notes, but you could leave notes. Everybody who's involved looks at it when it comes in just to make sure that it's what it's supposed to be.

Sometimes the artist or art director, you know, the art director might not have explained something correctly or the artist might have misunderstood something. Sometimes art comes in and it's a little off from what it's supposed to be. And often what will happen sometimes is there's some subtlety to the way the card works

that just wasn't conveyed quite right. So the nice thing about the sketch phase is you can give notes to the artist to change things. But sometimes the card will change slightly in between the commission of the art and the art coming in. Also, on rare occasion, this used to happen more in the past than it does in the present. Because our processes now, with the way we do sketches and stuff, this happens less.

But every once in a while, our card comes in that kind of contradicts what the card mechanic is. For example, so I'm pulling some examples from Mirage. And this is a long, long time ago, trying to show that the way we do things has changed enough that this doesn't happen a lot. But for example, there's a card in Mirage called, it was originally called Dwarven Scouts. And the art came back in and the artist,

it was supposed to make like one, two dwarf tokens. But the artists, the way they had drawn it, they just looked a lot more like goblins than dwarves. Now, note, I think this is before we had the world guide. So, like, nowadays, we're showing you all the creatures and showing exactly what they look like. But, for example, that card, we changed it from producing dwarf tokens to producing goblin tokens. And so it's an example every once in a while where sometimes we have to change the card to match the art. The more likely scenario these days is we assign the art, the card sort of got tweaked in between the assigning of the art and the art coming in, and now the art contradicts something about the card. And at that point, once the art exists, we need to change the card to match the art. So category number two is there's been a

little bit of flux in the card, just enough flux that something about the art doesn't line up, and you have to tweak the card. So number two isn't a whole rework. You're normally just tweaking it normally. Usually, I mean, unless you completely redid the card, but that's a separate issue. Normally in category two, it's like, well, we slightly tweaked the card and because of that, the art doesn't 100% line up, but we need it to line up. So then we tweak the card. So then we tweak the card. Okay, category number three is sometimes we commission the art, and then we kill the card before the art comes in, but the slot has been what we call CQI, Continuous Quality Improvement,

meaning we mechanically don't like the slot anymore. We want to change it. Now, the tricky part there is once the art is in, the art is in. That is the art for the card. So sometimes, and category three and category four and category five are a little bit more of what I'll talk about at the end about truly designing from scratch. Both in one and two, there's some elements you already understand that are there. It's less of a wholesale design. But four and five are wholesales that's what i mean by that is i have a hole artists come in i have to fill the hole but i'm beholden to the art the art exists i can't

contradict the art um and so that is what we call hole filling, where you're doing the hole filling from the art. Now, in Category 3, you're still, it happens late enough in the file that you're still beholden to making sense in the set. Meaning, you might be beholden, you know, you might need to be at a certain mana cost because you're filling in a curve, or you might need to be, like, there's certain things that the set will need. So it's not carte blanche. It's not that you can do anything. It's you can do anything that makes sense in the set that you're building. Okay, category four is a little more open-ended than that because category three, you can

do whatever you want, but it has to fit within the set. Category four happens earlier. Category four is, so when we make art and then get holes, as I explained with category three, sometimes we make art and sometimes what happens is we need a particular, like we realize we're missing a particular thing. So in the art budget, there's a small, there's a little bit of budget for late art. So sometimes what will happen is like, oh, this is, we realize we need something we don't have. We'll use our emergency budget and commission, you know, later in the process,

a new piece of art. So when that happens, the art that has already been commissioned that, you know, we paid for and everything exists, but the set doesn't need it. So it goes into what we call slush art. And I should stress, the reason you're going to slush art has nothing to do with the quality of the art. It's just the slot that the art was made for went away, so the art can't be used. So the key on slush art is, it's just art that we have, that we paid for, you know, and hey, can we, you know, the art directors will say, hey, can we find a place to use this? And oftentimes, it is good, I mean,

the reason a piece of art is in slush is not the quality of the art. It is just its whole, the whole, its slot went away. And oftentimes, look, an artist spent a lot of time on it. It's really nice. And the art directors want the art that the artist made to end up on cards. So they will occasionally come to us and say, hey, can you use some slush art?

The example I will give, just because I'm involved early in the process, so I don't do a lot of slush art design. That's usually in set design. But I did do some, so I will talk about it. So Unglued, it's a long time ago, 98, and I was designing this, so this was, you know, 96, 97. I said to them, I'm doing a lot of weird, wacky things, you know. A lot of sets take place on a singular plane, right?

And so one of the challenges about using slush art is that some slush art is very clearly from a particular place. Oh, that's clearly Ravnica. That's clearly Innistrad. And if you can recognize where it's from, then we have to wait for a slot where that makes sense. Now, A, maybe we return to that world. B, maybe we do a supplemental set.

Or in the past, we've done core sets. Maybe we do something that is more general where a piece of art can be from a known world and it's okay for the set. We have to find that place. Other times, there's something about it that has a certain, like, you've got to match the tone of the set.

Like, Innistrad is kind of dark and creepy, and so if it's bright and happy, maybe that doesn't make sense in an Innistrad set. So you also have to match, you know, tone, and anyway, there's a bunch of things you need to match to make sure that it fits the set. Okay, so what happened for Unglued was I went and said, hey, is there any slush art? And they said, hey, let me look at the this lush art. So there were two pieces that caught my eye. One was, I think the piece was called The Boogeyman. It is sort of at the, there's a character standing there on the foot of the bed and I think you even see the person in the bed

and something about it, I think there was something that was fun about it. There was something that like, even though it was called The Boogeyman, it wasn't a particularly scary piece. And I liked the idea that even The Boogeyman, he's got a name. You know, everyone calls him The Boogeyman. But, you know, and so that ended up being called Gus. And I just liked the idea. You know, hey, you know, I mean, yeah, he's got a role to fill.

Fine, Gus's day job is The Boogeyman, but he's still Gus. And the other one was, there's this piece of this creature at a desk that kind of looked like he was a zombie to me, so I made a card called Temp of the Damned, and I thought it was funny the idea that, you know, I mean, you know, a necromancer's got to make some money, so if he, you know, he can maybe, you know, animate some dead and put them out for temp work. So Temp of the Damned was just like a zombie working a day job, a desk job.

I thought that was funny. And the perfect example was I looked at the art and then I figured out, okay, how do I make this fit the tone of my set? Unglued was silly, so they had to be silly. And then I would then design to what they were doing. And like, actually, I don't remember the mechanics exactly of these cards, but Temp of the Damned, I was just playing to the idea that it's a zombie, but you know I, but anyway I'll get to how to design in a second. But the idea is in slush art

is it's done relatively early usually, meaning the category three where you're filling a hole or slot that got emptied that happened late in the process usually meaning art already got commissioned so that's pretty late in the process slush art usually you're designing that pretty early where you have a lot of flexibility of what what it could be and so that gives you some you know in some ways, the most flexibility because, I mean, you're matching the art,

but you're doing it early enough that the set hasn't quite settled as much, giving you more freedom. So the fifth category, when I was writing my notes for this podcast, originally I thought there were just four categories. Then I'm like, wait, wait, there's a fifth category. And the fifth category is sometimes we commission art,

well, not sometimes. For a while, we did this experiment where we would commission art and say to the artist, hey, draw it in this world, but just draw something cool. And then we would design to the art. The idea was, hey, could we make cool and interesting cards if we were inspired by the art? That was the idea. What ended up happening is that the cards didn't, it didn't end up being quite as good as making the mechanic and then designing

the art to the mechanic. In Central, like I said earlier, the art has so much more flexibility than the mechanics that just giving the, starting with the mechanic and then doing the art just usually ends up with a better process. But we experimented for a time, trying the other way. The other thing that occasionally happens, the one example I can think of is we were doing New Phyrexia. So at the time, New Phyrexia was the third set in the Scars of Mirrodin block. The whole shtick was

there was a war between the Mirrins and the Phyrexians. And we didn't tell you, the audience, what the final set was. It depended on who won the war and Mirrodin was sieged.

If the Mirrins won the war, it was Mirrodin pure. If the Phyrexians won the war, it was New Phyrexia. I think we announced just a few weeks before the set came out what it was going to be called. But we did a promotional ad, and so

in it, we needed to show a card from each set. And it was done early enough that we hadn't made the cards yet for New Phyrexia. So we made one card, quote-unquote, from Mirrored Impure, and yet for New Phyrexia. So we made one card, quote unquote, from Mirrodin Pure and one from New Phyrexia. And I think the art from New Phyrexia we then designed top down too. So every once in a while, the other example I think is

in Scars of Mirrodin, for example, I think we decided we wanted to do a Frexenized Angel, but we didn't quite know what it was going to do yet. But we were so confident, and maybe this falls in category one, we were so confident that we wanted a Frexenized Angel that we committed

ahead of time. I guess it's more category one. Anyway, so the fifth category is occasionally we sort of like purposely try to see what we can do by designing top-down. Okay, now that I've talked through the five categories, let me talk about how do you design top-down? How do you design, or not top-down, how do you design to art? Well, the first thing you have to do when you look at art is you have to say, okay, what is the focus of this art? What is, what,

what kind of card is this art? So the first thing normally you say, what card type is it? For example, if it's focusing on a creature, like if the main focus on the art is a creature, okay, it probably is a creature card. If the main focus is on a setting, it's probably land. If it's on an object, it's probably an artifact. If you see action, if something is happening, and the action is such a way that it's not, the main focus isn't the creature, but the main focus is on the action, that usually is like an instant or

sorcery. Enchantments tend to be more scenes, but scenes that don't feel like land that aren't super action-oriented. Enchantments usually are more, you see the results of what's going on. There is some flex.

I mean, there are certain pieces of art that I can look at and go, well, I could make it a creature, or I could make it a sorcery, or this could be a land, or it could be an enchantment. Like, there's some give, but the one thing you'll realize when you look at art is there's some restriction that it comes with it. There's something about it that's like, well, this is the focal point of the art, so the card you make has to really sell that thing. The next thing you want to sort of say about your art is,

is it implying anything mechanically? Oh, look, it's somebody throwing a fireball at somebody. Well, that kind of says direct damage. Or maybe there is a creature, or for example, one of our rules about art is flying has to be noticeable in the art. So if you're a flying creature, either you are literally seen in flight, or you have something that really heavily implies flight, like wings is probably the most common thing. So let's say I look at art and it's a creature,

and it's mid-flight, or it has wings. Okay, that's saying it's flying. It's a flying creature. wings. Okay, that's saying it's flying. It's a flying creature. You know, maybe, for example, it has a giant web, or it has an archer that's aiming at something in the sky. Maybe that implies reach.

So you have to sort of figure out mechanically, is there anything about the art that mechanically it's sort of heavily implying that it's doing? Because if that is true, then you have to meet that. So you take those two things. Now, the other thing is normally when you're designing, you're designing for something.

It's not often we design cards in a total vacuum. We've done that a little bit. But normally you're making it for some set. It's some set that's going in. So you're also influenced by, okay, this is in the set. What does it mean in the set? You also will think contextually for where it's going. And the fun thing that, so the thing that I like about designing to art is I've talked about this before. I think when you have

a different input, when the thing that guides you is something that is something that's never guided you before, you just end up with novel things. It's kind of why we did the experiment of doing art first. You definitely make things

that are unique. The best thing about designing art often is that you just have, you have an inspiration you never had. You know what I'm saying? Like, sometimes you'll

put together abilities you might never put together. But, well, this thing implies those abilities, so you put them together. And I do like the orthogonal thinking. So much of design really comes from a place of, like, fitting it into the puzzle that you're making. And that it's nice sometimes to just go,

I'm making this thing. What is this thing? The closest to it is, I would say, top-down design. The top design has this quality of, okay, the number one thing I'm trying to match is not a mechanical thing, per se. Not that I'm not trying to mechanically represent it,

but I'm being inspired by something that's not directly mechanical. And design and art has that similar quality. The other thing that is interesting about, like, a lot of my stories about design and art has to do about, you know, figuring, like, a lot of, like, so, for example, category two and three

are a lot more puzzle-solving, right? A lot more like, well, I need to do something and the art is there as a restriction, but I need to fill the guidelines that I got to do. How do I both fill in the guidelines but match the art? Where I think one and four and five have a little bit more of let the art live. I mean, I guess Category 1, because I'm matching a known thing, it's a lot like top-down.

So Category 1 is more top-down, just a little bit of influence of the art. Category 2 and 3 are more puzzle-making, where I'm trying to sort of stay true to the art but solve the puzzle of where it goes. And then 4 and 5 are a little more open-ended, where I have the freedom to sort of choose. So let's see. I'm trying to think of other stories of designing to art. Well, one of the things that is interesting is okay, so here's the story that I told. I told this at

one of my talks at a MagicCon. But this is a fun story. And it's a good example of the challenges that can happen. Now, once again, this is from Mirage. This is long ago. A lot of the things I'm going to explain in this story are not things we would do today. I think our systems are set up today to prevent something from this happening. We have more check-ins and stuff. But anyway, okay, so we had made

a card in Mirage that was an Aven, so like a bird person, that had protection from red. So I think the art description was, okay, show an Aven in the sky. He's being attacked by fire or something, you know, and he's laughing it off. You know, this is, you know, he is unfazed by the spell or whatever. So we get the art in and once again, this is before the, I think before we had sketches. We get the art in, the finished art, and you see an Aven

and you see a red spell attacking a fire spell. The problem is, just the way it was drawn, the expression of the Aven, you don't get the sense that the Aven is surviving this. You get the sense that the Aven is succumbing to it. Meaning, it's not selling protection from rat. You know, and obviously, you know, the artist was doing what was assigned to them. It was just sometimes just something about it.

It just didn't really convey protection from rat. And then once again, the majority of magic artists aren't magic players. We, in fact, don't, we don't give them the mechanics of the card. We translate it into sort of, you know, normal speech in the card concept and explain it.

And so, there's a lot of subtlety of, he's experiencing fire, but, you know, he's immune to the fire. It's tricky. So anyway, what we said is, okay, well, the problem with this card, I mean, we had the art we had. We needed to use the art. We're like, okay, the challenge here is that he looks as if he's being harmed by the fire. Okay, well, how do we use this piece of art?

So we said, okay, well, we have direct damage spells in it. What if it's one of our direct damage spells? So we moved it over to a direct damage spell. The larger story behind it is Mirage, once again, a long time ago, there's a process we used to do once upon a time in the early days

under the old system, where we would look at all the art in the set and ask if we needed to swap anything around. Are there art pieces that work better on other pieces of art? Not a practice we do anymore. We haven't done art swapping in 20 years. But as part of this process, we were able to swap around stuff. So we took this card and we made it a direct damage spell.

One problem still with it is that the focus of the art was on the Aven, because it was supposed to be. It was a card art drawn for a creature. So we ended up flopping it upside down. The dimensions, you can't put things sideways because the dimensions don't work, but you can, in most cases, turn them upside down. Once again, I want to stress,

we don't normally change the orientation from the artist. They care very much about that. That is not something we normally do. And even in this case, I believe the art director talked to the artist. But anyway, we ended up turning it upside down so instead of the focal point being the creature, the creature's now sort of upside down. It looks like they're sort of flying upside down and being hit by the fireball. Or maybe the fireball made them upside down. I don't know. But anyway,

it made the spell the center of it. And so we were able to sort of shift that around. Now, interestingly, that's a story not about designing to art, but adjusting art to match something else. Nowadays, we will not do that. Nowadays, what would happen is, let's say we get a piece of art in, and it doesn't quite match.

The most likely thing we'd do is Category 2, where we'd, okay, change the card so it matches what the art is doing. Or, it's possible that we remove it, you know, use our emergency art fund to get a different piece of art. And then later on it's slush art for a different set. Um, I don't think any other things, I'm almost at work here, so any final thoughts about designing to art? It is something that I enjoy. I think as a rare delicacy, it is fun. I think designing to art, when it happens every once in a while, is an interesting treat, and it's a cool little puzzle.

I do believe, I do firmly agree that usually the way to get the best overall package is to have the card mechanic finish first. And that's why we got out of the habit of occasionally just doing the art first. We found

that it just wasn't producing the quality we wanted as high as just giving the artist all the knowledge of what the thing is supposed to be. But like I said, as a rare thing, it is fun to design art. I don't, because I work later in the process, I don't do it all that often. But since I'm almost to work here, I will fill you in on one from Infinity. So I did, I was the set designer for Infinity, the only set I've ever been the set designer for. And so it was definitely something where I had to solve problems. So one example here, and this is not at all a problem with the artists.

This is a problem with we needed to change the card. So what's the name of the card? So there's a card where clearly there's been something that's been burned down, and there is a squirrel running from it. So you see like a pile of ash, something that burned down, and then you see the squirrel running away. So we had a cycle of cards where if you had to look to see if you could see something from your seat and that object would influence uh some reward that you got and so i think the reason a squirrel was running away from it in the art was it was always our intent that this thing uh had a side

effect producing a squirrel so that's why that's why the squirrel was in the art. But the idea of having the cycle where you had to see certain things came later. And so the challenge on the card was okay, what object can I have you see that makes sense with this art? And eventually what we realized was okay, well the thing had burned down. What if the thing you're looking for is a fire extinguisher?

That was something that, you know, at least in a business, at home maybe you don't have a fire extinguisher, but most businesses legally, at least in the States, they have to have a fire extinguisher. And so that's something in a store you could see.

I think we didn't want you to see a lot of them because we didn't want you making too many squirrels. And normally in a room, there's one fire extinguisher, unless it's a really big room. So anyway, that's an example where the art was done and I kind of had to craft my mechanics to make sense of what the art was. So that still goes on.

I just, I don't work on set design most of the time. So it's not something, it is something that I do more frequently. But on Infinity, because I was the set designer, I did have to solve some of that. So there was some of that to do. Anyway, guys, I'm literally parking as we talk here. So I hope you guys enjoyed, like I said. And for people on my blog, if you have questions,

if I have a question that there's a 30-minute answer to, I love sort of using my blog to sort of talk through cool things that people want to know about. So today was all about designing through the art. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

But as I'm literally parked my car, we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make a magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.