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Style Guide (for Major Project)

  • penspeare
  • May 7, 2024
  • 11 min read

Updated: May 14, 2024

(This blog post is part of a group for my Major Project assignment as part of my Masters in Animation. This is the general Major Project post, and the first one. Links to the other relevant blogs are under "Brother Blogs" under Navigation).

Preface

I had originally decided to develop my pitch bible as a part of my Major Project assignment, however; the focus turned to creating a style guide to go along with it, but it took up the majority of time. That said, a lot of the visual development for both overlap a great deal, so I decided to keep the blog post for that separate, which can be found here. The rest of this blog focuses specifically on the creation of the style guide.

Navigation

Table of Contents


Brother Blogs

Take me to the Major Project Plans blog

Take me to the Visual Development blog

Take me to the Industry Facing blog

Introduction

Decided to call the project Grimoire Gals, and so the style guide is going to look like a grimoire or, at least, a modern scrapbook-looking book of shadows, that is in reference to the one that Selena is holding in the pitch bible poster/cover, and the book that they are reading in the pitch bible itself.

It adds to the college aspect of the show as well as the overall subject matter, plus the pages could be covered in "graffiti" or even stickers that, once again, adds to that bored college student aesthetic, and punk look, that the series should encapsulate.

The pitch bible itself will have pages similar to this when it deals with the wordier aspects.



What is a Style Guide


Style guides are a great document to have, especially as an accompaniment piece to a series pitch bible. The idea is to have it as a literal guide for a team of artists so they have a reference point for how to - and sometimes how not to - draw and animate characters, the style or medium, etc., so that the look and feel of the series can be as uniform as possible across the departments.


Below I screenshot some definitions of what a style guide - or art bible - is:




Style guides can be short or as long as humanly possible.


  • Include examples of grimoires here, and discuss [ X ]


Although it isn't exactly a "real" grimoire as such, more of a homage, it is based on old medieval spell books by the fictional wizard Merlin, and is full of fake candle wax seals, envelopes with extra letters, and various illustrations that are "stuck down" (just for the aesthetic of the book), coffee or wine stains to give it a more immersive touch. I want to achieve a similar effect with the style guide, but giving it a modern "college attender" twist.


  • The wizardology handbook: a course for apprentices. D. A. Steer. Candlewick Press: Massachusetts;

  • Faeries, Frond, B., and Lee, A. 1979. Peacock Press: New York;



I put together a quick collage of some of the more interesting pages in the Wizardology book, especially those with "stuck on" extras such as envelopes, or illustrative pages. It's similar to what I would like the style guide to be presented as.


Style Guide Planning

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The link at the bottom of this section by YouTuber "Yes I'm a Designer" goes over how to create a style guide. Although it's specifically garnered towards actual brands and how to carry it across, there is a lot of overlap and is still incredibly helpful.


  1. Needs a table of contents

  2. Dos as well as Don'ts

  3. I mentioned somewhere about drawing characters' hair/hats being in a gyroscopic view - add this, but also add where it talks about this from Illusion of Life in the blog post for research

  4. Consider how the style guide will be laid out, and what differentiates the style guide from the actual pitch bible


Thumbnails


I doodled up this first one mainly for fun, but then my lecturer, Sarah, pointed out that these are a good thing to include as they can help demonstrate the type of shots that should be in the series, or how the storyboards should end up looking. So I made a few more.






Stylistic Approach


Emulating a traditional art mixed-media style from my own illustrations and comics. Chalk pastel backgrounds, with marker characters that stand out from the rest. I didn't have a lot of time to properly get into the background exploration as a lot of focus was put into developing two main characters, as well as the style guide itself. That said, I did my research into into '80s/'90s cartoons as that was the general vibe I wanted to go for, so I want to embrace those obvious DIY looks where, for example, you'll know exactly which drawer or door a character is about to use because it's been coloured in a completely different way than the rest of the background.






(Might move this around later of I find a better fit for it somewhere else)

I am re-considering making her hat gyroscopic, but I'll have a look at some similar existing examples. Jotaro from the Stardust Crusaders arc of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure wears a snapback style hat, so it will be worth having a look at how the animators show that with different angles.


Experimenting with what feels right regarding Aoife's hat.

They're not really in proportion or are particularly on model, but here I'm churning out some expressions and toying around with how Aoife conveys her emotions.








Researching the Role of Art Director


Also looking into "showrunners" as well and their responsibilities. From the sounds, they are essentially the exact same role, if not remarkably similar. I really enjoyed the production management in the previous semester as I like organising things and brining them together, even if it can be a bit of a headache at times. Anyway, the Style Guide is the perfect document curated by such a role, as it serves as the handbook to reference back to, alongside a pitch or series bible for the art director to gather all the information they need to share with their team.

I included some of these images in the Visual Development blog post, but they are relevant here too, so I decided to leave them in. Above is part of the end credits of a fan made Ed, Edd n Eddy unofficial sequel show which includes notes on how to draw the backgrounds and what to consider while drawing them - the types of things that you would find in a style or art guide for a show with a team of artists.


The next two images I found when trying to find the definition of an art director, and the first includes what they, as an art director themselves, would include in an art or style guide.


"What is an Art Director?" via Studio Binder.



While drawing the character "line up" (less of a traditional line up, but more of a scene including all three of the major characters interacting with each other), I realised that a part of Selena's outfit would be incredibly difficult to draw or even animate constantly. So, where I'm not focusing on her for this particular assignment, I will touch on this one aspect of her design.


The Cartoon Network animated show Chowder employed this technique to the extent it became a staple of the show. It's called "Unmoving Plaid" or "perspective incorrect texturing". It can be used to deliberately look strange, or it can be used simply to adhere to a limited animation method, particularly for complicated aspects of design, such as the namesake suggest, plaid. In this case, Selena has a fishnet style feature in her design, so this would make it easier to animate; in other words, having a separate layer that has a static design would mean the animator would not have to draw the fishnets over and over again, making their job a lot less tedious.




Above, the Cartoon Network animated series Chowder utilised the "unmoving plaid" technique a lot to the point it's almost jarring, but they make it work with their mixed media look, which is something I've always really admired about the aesthetic of the show.


Layout of Style Guide


The style guide is going to emulate a grimoire, or book of spells/shadows that Selena or Aoife put together in a binder. The look of the guide itself should give an idea of the tone of the series and its themes. It's an urban fantasy mainly set around a college campus, so it should tell you that through its visuals but, of course, still maintaining and not distracting from its primary purpose as a style guide if a crew were to reference it to make it into a fully realised series.


  • Show examples of grimoires and spell books - 3-4 [ / ]

  • It will have a front and back cover, so consider these too




Just a placeholder at the moment, but I want the overall look of the style guide itself to look like the book that Selena is holding on the front cover of the pitch bible. The book is also featured in the pitch bible itself where the characters are seen actively using it, as well as the inside of the book being "viewed" by the reader. I like bringing all these elements together as it makes it makes it a bit more immersive and engaging to read. The purpose of tying these aspects together, at least I'm aiming to, help bring the series itself to life.


It looks a lot better with a cover (it's just a generic cardboard scrapbook or sketchbook cover); I'm still going for the scrapbook college assignment aesthetic for their grimoire/book of shadows, so this is fine. I do need to tweak it though, as all I did was stretch it out in Photoshop to fit the dimensions, then transform>flip horizontally for the back of it, so the binder or spine looks a bit silly at the moment. It does the trick for now though; when I go to refine the look of it, I'll probably emboss the planchette logo and "Style Guide" book title, and tidy those up, and maybe add a "sticker" or two to the front and back especially to make it a bit more personal to the main cast.


This is one of those "pseudoscience" or hypothetical novelty books. It's supposed to be "Merlin"'s personal grimoire, and


[Insert a collage of the photos from the example of a previous year as well for their style guide]





  • Take some photos of your own scrap books and ring binders, and get first hand, real examples of books to better help shape the look of this [ X ];

  • Get some file paper and tea stain it to see how it looks, then post the results [ / ];


I'm considering playing around with the dimensions of the pages; some of the grimoires I've looked at are more square shaped, so I might do that instead. This will influence what the book is "supposed" to be (i.e., ring binder folder, college project booklet, or maybe a scrapbook or art book with paper "stuck down" on it)



I think it looks a lot better in a more squared orientation; it feels more like a scrapbook project one of the characters was working on, with everything taped down from printed documents or file paper or photos



Note: The font sizes noted above are based on the thumbnails in the Photoshop document; I had to translate it to a bigger size in the Affinity Designer document.


[May need to re-arrange the order of the screenshots for better clarity] [Important ETA: Wix blogs, for some reason, do not have a feature where you can copy/cut and paste images within your blog. This is incredibly frustrating when trying to fix and tidy things up, so apologies but I will try my best to make these blogs as easy to navigate as possible, especially considering this issue]









At the moment, they're all just placeholders before I neaten them up and add some accents to the pages such as "tape", annotations, bits of scrap paper and file paper, etc., but this is good to see in front of me to have a better, visual idea of what the layout should be, at least roughly, and I can work around that and figure out what I need from there.



Ran into an issue; it's small so I didn't notice it until much later:

For some reason, despite it being set as a Master Page so should be uniform throughout the document, pages 6 and 7 are slightly off centre. I'm unable to fix it easily because the images are part of Master Pages... but I'm not sure why it did that, or why it's the only pages affected.


And then:

I deleted some pages I didn't need, and... it did this. I think because the Master Page is actually a spread, and you select which pages it is to apply it to, so I might have confused the software in the process. In fairness, it's just small things that probably have an obvious solution, but it's still mildly annoying.

I wanted to include a blank page just before the cover so it didn't just suddenly end, but I ended up deleting it for simplicity's sake. The cover itself is still effectively a placeholder (I know I need to fix the spine of the book throughout, but I just want to get the idea across instead of the small aspect, so I'll worry about that after marking if I don't have time)


I threw in the above image to show I needed to separate all the individual expressions to make it easier for me to move them around the page (top page; Aoife's Expressions) , as opposed to one big image (bottom page; Dave the Devil's Expressions), as it allowed me to experiment better with the layout.



This next part has a huge overlap with the Visual Development, and is to show the characters interacting with one another. It took out a big chunk of time to be honest, so where I'd like to give it a proper polish up, I had to stop and say "that's good/done enough" to get the idea across so I could focus on other aspects of the project. Either way, I'll go through the process of creating it:


I put together various references on the side for specific poses, turns, or objects, or inspiration from existing animated media



Here it is all cleaned up and in the style guide itself, although it does still need a background. The point of the image is to showcase the main cast together in a scene though, and that message is being put across.


Conclusion

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The final outcome for this project is a PDF document of the style guide, and is linked in the submissions page of Blackboard, alongside links to the relative blog posts, including this one.


As I mentioned earlier on in the blog post, style guides can be as short or as long as humanly possible. They could technically go on and on, which made this project quite daunting in some ways, as it was difficult to know where to start, or where to continue, and what was done enough.

Due to the fast paced nature of a Masters course (and also personal circumstances halfway through the module that affected much of the timing and then some), shifting of priorities for certain sections throughout the module occurred a lot. Either way, I decided to make notes in the finalised document itself and add in placeholders, but also chose certain aspects to focus on, such as a limited number of characters (notably Aoife and The Devil, who later became affectionately known as Dave) to make the task less daunting. I have every intention to keep working on the style guide beyond the assignment hand in.


The style guide itself serves as a collective example of a body of work, like a portfolio, but regarding a specific set of characters or theme or, in this case, a hypothetical show, so I was told that I could submit it as part of the Industry Facing materials package. There are certainly still a lot of things about it that I'd like to continue, even the general visual development of it, but it was a case of picking certain aspects to explore for the module assignments... otherwise it could go on forever honestly; that got very overwhelming and hard to know where to start, or what to move onto next, not to mention "how long should I take on this or that". It's all trial and error though and a big learning process, and I'd like to continue with all of it beyond the marking period, as certainly I had to say "this is done enough for now", especially after receiving feedback, so I can go in a more informed direction after fresh eyes look at it.




References

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