Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #188 - Matts Job

Episode Date: December 12, 2014

Mark talks about what Matt does at Wizards.

Okay, we are pulling out of the Wizards parking lot. You know what that means? No, you don't know what that means because we've never done this before. It's the very first ever drive from work. So what happened is, I drove Matt to work today, and I don't get the chance to do podcasts with Matt all that often. So we decided we're going to do a podcast on the way home, as well as we did one on the way here, which you guys just listened to recently.

Okay, so today's topic, or the driving home topic, I talk all the time about what I do for Wizards, but we have not talked much about what Matt does. In fact, we talked a whole bunch about what Matt used to do on other podcasts, back when Matt did Names and Flavor Texts. But so, Matt, let's explain what you do now. Wow, where to start? My prior job was much, much easier to define because I had output I was expected to hand over, and that output was creative text on cards, which is super exciting to a whole lot of folks. And my job now is, it's way more broad than that, and

does not, it doesn't touch cards all that often. Although some little corner cases here and there have had effects on cards in the last handful of years. So, yeah, if you have a question to help kick this off, that would help. The thing to explain to people is probably the thing you have the biggest impact on, I'd say it's packaging? So when I got my job, I was the sole person in my, air quotes, department, or at least the little team that I would soon become. or at least the little team that I would soon become. And packaging was my initial first challenge to overcome. The folks on the brand team and the folks on the production team were not completely satisfied with what we had going on.

completely satisfied with what we had going on, that's why my job was created, to find a person who could spend his or her time connecting the dots, I would say. Well, let me fill something in so people understand. So the way Wizards works is, there's an R&D group, and R&D is in charge of making the cards. So R&D has design and development making the cards. So R&D has

design and development. It has the creative team. It has editing. It's everybody that's sort of making the cards before it goes to physically get made.

The creative aspect of making them. Then there's an entire group called CAPS. I don't even know what CAPS stands for. Creative and Production Services. I guess I didn't know that. Creative and Production Services. So CAPS

job is to physically get the cards made into, there's a whole bunch of stuff there, but it has to do with packaging, it has to do with physically printing the cards, it has to do with layout, it has to do with, there's lots and lots of just technical things that have to happen to take the ideas that

R&D has and actually make cards. And CAPS is in charge of all that stuff. Meanwhile, there's the brand team. And the brand team is in charge of making sort of executive decisions about, they oversee marketing, and they oversee, like, they make decisions about, like,

how many cards do we print? And how, you know, they organize plays under them. They have a lot to do with overseeing how magic is done. It's a good thing that you spelled that out because that helps me

explain how my role has become more broad and less well defined because I actually have two bosses. Two bosses? I'm one of the lucky ones that doesn't get to serve just one master. How wonderful is that?

I report directly to my boss, who is the director of creative in CAPS, but I also report to the senior director of brand so in a way that spreads me across all of so they might know the senior director of brand who's the senior director of brand elaine chase elaine chase so the work that i do and the work that my team does touches everything from the things that we physically produce like the cards and the work that my team does touches everything from the things that we physically produce, like the cards and the packaging the cards come in, to the marketing for the product, to the videos that help promote the product, to the displays and the experiences at events that you might go to,

whether that's the Pro Tour or a Grand Prix or even one of our convention-based events like PAX or Gen Con or whatever. As well as our video games and licensed products. licensed products like those of you who who buy deck protectors and deck boxes and what not from Ultra Pro or t-shirts

or Funko Pops which are one of our hot new items like all of that stuff gets art directed from folks on my team so that's a lot of stuff? it is a lot of stuff one thing that I was going to allude to earlier From folks on my team. So that's a lot of stuff? It is a lot of stuff. So. Oh, one thing that I was going to allude to earlier is that in the past, I would say prior to five years ago,

we used to make products one at a time, and each one was made with its own interests in mind, and that was pretty much the extent of it. It was a little bit more of a myopic view than we use now, where we create whole campaigns that are tied together, and in order to tie things together, someone has to step backward a little bit and take a broader view as opposed to getting so tactically involved in each thing. That's what I do. So let me say a little bit,

to clarify a little bit. What Matt is saying is when it used to be when we did things that there was no larger cohesive sense to them. That each individual thing, the people that were doing it would figure out

for whatever they were doing, what they needed to do. And that there wasn't any sort of common connector between everything. Right. So, for example, if we were going to do Plane Chase, the art direction

and design for Plane Chase was decided on, like, in a bubble like whatever was working for that particular single iteration of that product is what they did as opposed to thinking about what um what could tie plane chase together to the products most closely related to it or the products that would release next or the things that would sit on the shelf next to. But now we do quite a bit of that. In fact, that is the lion's share of my brain space is given over to how to connect magic

products together. A good example for that is the font that we developed last year. Named? Named Baleran. Baleran. So that's Jace's last name for those that might not know. In fact, it wasn't just named for his last name to be cheeky. Quite a bit of the character of that font was derived from his costuming. And you can see in some of the letter forms

a very close relationship to the white markings on his cloak and on his shoulder armor and what have you. So things like that occupy quite a bit of my time. Between that and our marketing campaigns, that's where most of my creative effort is focused. It's hard when you say that

Matt's job is caring about this font and caring about the coloring on that package and caring about how the Funko Pops look and all that. For example, people ask some idea of some of the stuff Matt's done. The core sets for the last look and all that. So, for example, people ask some idea of some of the stuff Matt's done. The corsets for the last couple years,

I know that, for example, which one had the black? Which was the... M15? M15. Oh, no, M13. I know, for example, if you remember the corset M13 that had the very staunch, it was a white and black look. I know that was one of your...

Oh, that's 15. 15. That was one of your babies. Yes. Yeah, that, it is pretty widely regarded by folks in the company as the most cohesive marketing campaign that we've ever done in that from the video to the marketing materials to the products themselves, the packaging, the inserts, the ad cards, like all of it, in addition to the actual look of Duels of the Planeswalkers, all of it was so tightly tied together. And we all agree that

each individual piece is made stronger by its connection to the rest. So I'm going to pick out a little detail here and try to show them the kind of thing that you might not think about, but it matters. So I'm going to talk about Return to Ravnica. Sure. So one of the things that's very cool is to try to show them the kind of thing that you might not think about, but it matters. So I'm going to talk about Return of Ravnica. Sure.

So one of the things that's very cool is, if you look at anything that has to do with Return of Ravnica, and that includes all three sets and any other things surrounding it, there was a texture you guys created that was the texture that was used in the background. Well, actually, that texture, it bled out beyond just the background. And it was the first time we did what is, I guess, we call a post-production process on our artwork. And it was one of the first times where we really blew the artwork out of a box. Like for many years we had drawn very clear boxes around the art and contained them. And in an interest to make the art bigger and more boundless, we used that texture and that edge, like a broken edge treatment to really let that art

burst out and cover as much of any surface as we could possibly put it on. And what I'm talking about, those may not be clear, if you ever looked at a box of Return of Ravnica, there was sort of a city,

I don't know how to describe it, but it was like a texture that had buildings and had a sort of city feel to it. It was like a texture that had buildings and had a sort of city feel to it. It was like a striated, vertical, cityscape-like texture. It wasn't exactly a city, but it was definitely indicative of or reflective of the feel of a vertical, urban environment.

It's really cool. One of the things that it did that I think was almost subconscious on some level is it just made all the elements of Return of Ravnica feel like they belong to the same thing. Yes.

And it's something that I really, I mean, I don't know if people, one of the things that's very neat about design in general is people don't necessarily know what you're doing but they know the feel when it's done correctly you know one of the um particular challenges with the ravnica block is that anything you do let's just say you need to make some decision about what this particular set is going to look like in terms of its packaging presence.

That is true all the time. But what's not true all the time is that you also have to have ten different versions of that thing. So we needed to come up with some sort of visual scheme that supported its own look. And if you remember, Return to Ravnica was generally blue, and Gatecrash was generally red, and... Dragon's Maze. Dragon's Maze was generally yellow. But you could take any of those and look at the Gruul version, or the Dim demure version or the simic version, and they all hung together well because of that aggressive texture treatment that Mark was talking about.

And that's a good example of something that, like, I'm not even sure people consciously thought about it, but it really tied everything together. And the thing that's been very exciting is, like, one of the things that I know you guys don't, at home, probably don't think too much about, like, just the art of packaging. You know, that if you go back and look at packaging over the years,

it is so stark, the difference between modern packaging and packaging of age old. One of the things that we've really been trying to do is finding a way to sort of capture two opposing requirements. One, which is hold true to what magic's look and feel is. Magic is a sophisticated and gritty and I would say I don't want to use badass but I'm going to use it anyway. Badass fantastical thing and that wants what it wants But the state of the art of packaging and making a product stand out in the huge glut that is any shelf environment in a store, those things might want different things.

In the store, you want something that is attractive to the eye and possibly either very bright in color or something that is very dark in an area that's normally bright color well so let me jump in here so something that people to understand is i mostly on this podcast talk about the making of the game which is about mechanics and sometimes i talk a little bit about creative but one of the things that i don't get into a lot is you know r&d is one tiny section of a much, much larger thing. And that, like, packaging is a real good example of whether or not people buy your product. Now, if you're invested and you already know about it, fine. You walk in knowing about it.

But let's say you're not up on what the latest magic thing is. You know, we need to make people who walk in a store go, what is that? And, like, what is that? Packaging is a huge, huge part of products. I don't talk a lot about it because I don't do it day to day, but this is what Matt does do. For example, take any brand. I'll just use Coca-Cola as an example. They spend a lot of time and energy so that every Coca-Cola product feels like it is part of the Coca-Cola family.

Well, they cheat. They cheat. One of the things that is so challenging about the work that we do on Magic is that our business model is so different from what I would consider to be the movers and the shakers in the packaging industry. Coca-Cola knows that if they stick to Coke Red, people are going to know it. If it's red and it's white, they're going to feel Coca-Cola, and they get to ride that day in, day out, year after year. And we have to change our entire presentation every four months or every three months. And that's an insane amount of mind space change. How do you keep the consumer knowing which products are yours while you're yanking the rug out from under them every three months?

It's super, super challenging. Yeah, it is true that, like, my entire... Since I was a kid, like, the red and white can is the Coke can. And, yeah, one of the things about Magic, it's funny, because one of the strengths of the game is it's constantly changing, and it's exciting, and the reason people don't get tired of it, much like some other games, is because it's constantly changing. But that's a lot harder when your job is to make people recognize, you know.

And plus, it has to look like magic. Magic has to have a continual, people have to recognize it as magic. Yet, right, Return of Ravnica can't look like Theros, which can't look like Constantark here. So one thing that we've been focusing on lately is finding common threads between the products that we've made that have had some visual success. Return to Ravnica, the whole Ravnica block is a good example. M15 is a very good example. But if you were to hold those two next to each other, you may not see much in common at all. So as strong as each was on their own, we really do need to find something that tells you as a consumer, when you buy Return to Ravnica and then you see this other thing coming up after it that you have the comfort of knowing,

ah, this is home for me. These are the products that I've had success with in the past and I'm interested in buying in the future. So let's take, I'm going to take Conta Tarkir because it's the current product. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about like what did you do to make Conta Tarkir have a distinctive look that was Conta Tarkir because it's the current product. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about, like, what did you do to make Conta Tarkir have a distinctive look that was Conta Tarkir? Well, as always, we start with what feels right for magic. And for those of us who work in the creative

or the marketing parts of magic, we know that the artwork is so, so strong. It's probably the ace in the hole that we always have. So finding a way to let the art set the tone, that's always job one. Um, that's, that's always job one. Job two is how to put a wrapper around that, that, uh, that doesn't overshadow that artwork, but rather supports it and throws up a pretty loud flag as far as, um, if you go into the store and you're looking for Khans of Tarkir, you can say, ah, the red one. Yeah. Um, That's important.

That's important that you have that immediate, like, visceral reference. You can even, if you have a friend that you just taught how to play Magic and he wants to know what to go by, you can say, it's probably the red one. You go to to target it's going to be the red one so every set usually has it's color identifiers that you know but for example Fate Reforged which is going to come out later in the year has to look like

it's part of the Kansatarkir block but not be Kansatarkir exactly so that's where the third layer comes in and that is what can we derive from the third layer comes in and that is what can we derive from the creative of that world of that setting that can inform the um i'll call it the shape language of that uh of that campaign and in this case we um we derived a lot of We derived a lot of visual action from the idea of snapping banners in the wind, like a horizontal sweeping brush-strokey sort of feel,

happened to be on point with the idea of an asian inspired sumi brush style art theme which also just so happens to fit nicely with an idea of there's a very fine line between what is a brush stroke and what is a blood splatter. And cons being a set about warrior conflict, like all of those things came together really nicely into a framework that we can twist the dials on in terms of color. So in Fate Reforged comes out, and when Dragons of Tarkir come out, they are distinct from each other but of a family yeah and like i said it's it's it's interesting uh i've actually had a lot more chance to obviously talk with you and and like this is something i think the people listening to this podcast this

is a topic we never i never ever talk about um but the thing that i I always find super fascinating is how you guys manage to, like, pull out of the set. Like, I always think in mechanical terms because that's what my job is. But, like, Contest Archer, I mean, when you guys are, like, what defines, like, when you guys do this, how did you figure out what defined Contest Archer? Where do you start well first we uh we consume whatever concept artwork has been created up to that point oh let me explain real quickly so what happens is for every year for every block um the creative team gets artists in and they do uh it uses multiple weeks long three or four weeks long and and they do a, it uses multiple weeks long, three or four weeks long,

and that they build a world, and they build a Bible, if you will, that they hand out, I mean, it's thick, it is, you know, 80 pages, and a lot of it's full color, and it's like, here's what the world does. And that world building, I mean, one of the amazing things that Magic does is we build a brand new world. We've been doing it every year and now we're upping our game

to do it two times a year. Not so. Which is kind of crazy. Because if you look at, I remember I read all about Pandora, which is the Avatar world. Yeah. And they spent like four to five years, which is the Avatar world. And they spent like

four to five years fleshing out the world. Slow pokes! Like four to five years. So what happens is we produce this document that sort of shows off the world. So what Matt is talking about is, well, one of the first things they do is they look at all the work that's done.

Right. We look at that and we also we get a download from the writers who will give us some sort of sense of the tone of the happenings on that world. If Tarkir was an Asian-inspired world that wasn't about warrior clans, but instead was about, I don't know... Calligraphy. It might have come off feeling entirely different, something more akin to what Kamigawa was.

So anyway, we take those elements and we find which of those things plays well with the bits and pieces graphically that the brand wants to retain across the board. And from that, we normally come out with more ideas than the one that we settle on. How many ideas do you usually come up with? Well, similar to what the creative team does with their concept artists we have concept designers take swings at like malleable graphic look and feel elements for a matter of you know five to six weeks and after hundreds and hundreds of ideas are slung on the wall, it's a pretty bloody process of, you know,

hacking things down to the cutting room floor until the ones that are the most universally applicable, you know, they survive the day. How many people are we talking about? Like, how many graphic designers does Magic have? How many people are we talking about? How many graphic designers does Magic have? Across all of the teams in the company,

we've got to have 10 or 15 full-time graphic designers across many different departments, not just my own. I have two designers on my team specifically, and they are total badasses. Gino Choi and Pamela Ansman-Wolf are both, they're both capable of running one of those concept processes pretty much solo, but we always appreciate the ideas of other teams and fresh faces. And those two will lead a design team. And from all of the ideas that that group creates, we find the answers. So what is your favorite?

How long have you had this job now? Almost five years. Okay, so what is your favorite thing you've done in the five years? What's the thing you're most proud of? Favorite thing? Well, I am extremely proud of how M15 came out top to bottom. I think that it is totally badass. M15, remember, it was a black and white treatment where it had colors like, it was Garrick's face and it was black and white, but he had the purple glint, right? And there's a couple different boxes.

There are many, many expressions of that look and feel. And one of the things that's really cool about it is that when you take all the color out of an image and you put one bit of color in, you can really, really message Magic's five colors as strongly as you need to. Sometimes you can find a piece of red card art that's mostly blue, and that doesn't help. It doesn't really help solidify that message if what you really want to do is say this is red um well the m15 look and feel allowed us to suck all of the conflicting color out create a very impactful and film noir type look and then pop that red color back in uh it was super super impactful and really successful i'm very proud of that um i'm also pretty proud of the uh the original detective

cards how we call them um the san diego comic-con uh exclusive cards. Those were a pretty tight collaboration between the creative team and my team. It was a unique and very courageous look that I think had big impact, and we pulled off really well. One of the things that's interesting is because we're constantly changing that you guys have to keep coming up with sort of new tricks to try that you can't like one of the things I always joke about

is that the audience is the borg that whenever you use something against them they learn and then you gotta use something different and then I think that a lot of what you guys are doing is just trying to find new and different visual ways to represent the brand and different products. Yes.

I also mentioned earlier the font and I'm really proud of that as well because of how tiny the target was. To find something that had magic relevance, had enough flourish and flavor to not seem like a boring system font,

but at the same time be legible and an easy transition from the card font that we have had for the last, you know, eight or nine years, like, that's super small to be both recognizable and assimilating at the same time. Like, that's almost impossible, but I feel like we, we found something that has character and also, um, longevity. Like. It isn't so fantasy geeky that it's going to seem old news in three years. So the folks who worked on that did a bang-up job, and I'm extremely proud of how that came out. So we're almost to Matt's house. So for those that weren't aware,

Matt used to live right by me, like three blocks away. Now he's a little farther away. Still in the same town. But as a wrap-up before we finish here, is there any final thought, any something about what you do that, like, I don't know, you haven't had a chance to reference or any before we end for the day.

Yes, this is a little bit related to a theme that we had talked about in our previous podcast, and that is people. The projects that I've talked about in this podcast, the amount that I've actually touched the imagery, the amount of actual artwork that I have done on them is like the head of a pin. Really what I've been involved in in the last five years is working with people and helping move those people toward the results that we have. Completely new ground for me. Total crazy challenge of its own. But like I said in the previous podcast, I love the people that we work with. And I'm blessed to have such awesome and talented people executing.

And I'm blessed to have such awesome and talented people executing. And, yeah, it's super rewarding to have success as a team as opposed to just when I was formerly painting cards. It's just me. Yeah. It's just me. And, yeah, I can be proud of the work that I did. But that's just me on the bar stool toasting myself. It's not nearly as cool as it is to have success with a bunch of cool folks. So we have arrived at Matt's house.

So I want to thank Matt for joining me for a very different drive. Actually, the very first ever drive from work. So thanks for joining me. And now that I'm at Matt's house, I guess that means it's time for me to almost end my drive to work. So thank you for joining us, Matt. And I guess it's time for me to be, not making magic, but going home. So thanks for joining me, guys. Bye-bye.