Eymyth Media Arts Festival 2022
EyeMyth is India’s only independent media arts festival and this year, it's in a digital avatar, celebrating 10 years of storytelling! The curation explores present and future cases of immersive storytelling and new media, bringing together young creative professionals, artists and performers from India, South Asia & the Global Media Arts space. This edition of Eyemyth Media Festival focusses on South asian new media and Gaming industry.
We delve into Illustration, Visual Design, Branding, and Digital Design for the of the project in this presentation. This project was executed by a small team of designers from Quicksand design studio and Unbox. Parts of the project showcased below are predominantly executed by Gaurav, unless stated otherwise.
Project Manager- Tejas Nair, Avinash Kumar
Visual Design- Gaurav Vikalp, Madhav Nair
Illustration- Gaurav Vikalp, Madhav Nair
Digital Design- Gaurav Vikalp, Hiren Kangad
Sound Design- Tejas Nair
Technology Partner - Lemonade Social
^ Eyemyth 2022 main artwork inspired by Ludo- a South-Asian origin board game
As Eyemyth spotlights the South-Asian Gaming Industry in this edition of the festival, we decided to use Ludo as a central artefact. As Ludo finds it's origins in South-Asia, it felt fitting to use the motif to talk about South-Asian Gaming Industry.
The concept was to create a sentient Ludo board with four-corners as hands and feet. The sentient Ludo board plays the dice, and then spins around for the next person's turn. The artwork uses South-Asian ornamentation and motifs.
^ Above 1. Typical Ludo Board Game 2. 'Tipu's Tiger' sculpture at V&A Museum 3. Miniature painting of Lord Krishna and Radha
The artwork takes cues from a typical Ludo board, to artefacts like Indian Miniature Paintings from the Mughal era. The colour palate takes closely from primary colours of the Ludo Board, to the bright polychromatic colours from the miniature paintings.
The pawns on the board take stylistic cues from the wood cut sculpture 'Tipu's Tiger'. The artefact is a menacing image of a Tiger( India's National Animal ) feasting on an East India Company Soldier. The sculpture is one of the many Indian artefacts that now reside in a British Museum( V&A Museum) post decolonisation. The subtle nod to the artefact is to invoke the subliminal message of championing South- Asian achievements in the gaming industry that otherwise is predominantly western.
^ Above 1. Early rough Iteration of the Ludo Board with hands coming in from the outside 2. Simplified rough of the Ludo Board 3. Rough drawings of the pawns, inspired by vehicles of Indian Dieties.
The Animal pawns on the board game were inspired by Jumanji. The pawns created were also inspired by Mythological animals that Indian Dieties use as their vehicles. For example, Swan is Goddess Saraswati's vehicle. These pawns were a subtle nod to Indian Mythology. We finished the pawns with accessories inspired by vocations like gaming, sound design, videography etc.
^ 1. Music Producer Tiger(Godess Durga's Vehicle), 2. Media artist Swan( Godess Saraswati's Vehicle), 3. Gamer Monkey ( Inspired by Monkey god Hanuman), 4. Videographer Owl ( Goddess Laxmi's Vehicle)
Additional stylistic elements like geometric Islamic architecture motifs, Ghoongroo (Jewellery for feet) etc. were added. These made for easy elements that we could use to extend the branding on additional assets and web.
The intention with the type was to make things look dressed down and informal. As the main artefact is doing the heavy lifting, so we decided to create type for the logo that didn't feel imposing. We wanted the type to be dynamic enough for it to evoke the artwork, but ubiquitous enough to work along with the artwork.
^ Top - Hand- drawn Logotype for Eyemyth . Bottom - High-contrast Logo symbol inspired by the central motif of the artifact. To be used for high- contrast use cases like print and Favicon.
We wanted to keep the typefaces relatively ubiquitous, and yet slightly stylised. We also had to consider the contrast of the typefaces, as the Heading and the body text were on a black background on the website, albeit in a relatively big type-sizes. We also ventured into creating the whole alphabet set in the Eyemyth Logotype style. This alphabet set provided an avenue for soft branding.
Eyemyth website was a gateway to all the talks that participants could access. We created a landing page that detailed out all the information about event, as well as provided the call to action to access the live event.
The event was divided into separate sections that the attendants could access to view during the event.
^ Indie Game Arena, Media Arts Hub, Massive Mixer conference are some of the section that the attendees could access during the Eyemyth event. Artworks and brand material for these sections was created by Madhav Nair.
As the website needed to morph from information centre to hosting the event, we took an agile approach to the design. We created low fidelity wireframes that we used to discuss high level design and navigation. This was followed up with higher fidelity achromatic wireframes to test out the interactions and the design. This approach allowed us to test out what worked and what did not work at an early stage and avoid back and forth with all the teams.
^ Above 1. Kirtimukha at Ellora Cave 16, Aurangabad, Maharashtra, 2. Ahoi Mata Pooja Poster- Poster to pay offerings to during festivities, 3. Mughal Era Miniature Painting with flat primary colours
^ Above 1. Kirtimukha at Ellora Cave 16, Aurangabad, Maharashtra, 2. Ahoi Mata Pooja Poster- Poster to pay offerings to during festivities, 3. Mughal Era Miniature Painting with flat primary colours
Outside of the Eyemyth web event, one could experience the festival offline with Eyemyth merchandise. We created high- contrast version of the artwork and applied it to merchandise like T-shirts and tote-bags that was sent out to the attendees, event partners and contributors.
^ High-contrast artwork applied to tote-bags and T-shirts.
Aside from the merchendise, participants were invited to claim the Eyemyth artwork as a digital souvenir. A limited number of NFTs of the artwork were provided to the participants to claim during the event.
^ A message to the participants who claimed their Limited NFT with their digital wallet for attending the event.
^ Getting recognised for our efforts of recognising South Asian Media arts by publications like Homegrown and Mid-day.
