Forgotten Lore

So I wanted to share with you something I learned over a decade ago. And then completely forgot about.

Back when I worked on a continuous cycle, story-driven fantasy card game (CCG), one of my projects was to develop a style guide for the whole ball of wax: characters, story, architecture, geography, etc. I'd never done one before and was going to use other company style guides as a basis. I figured that if they were good enough for a $60 million a year property, they'd be fine for my piddly $5 million game. It just never occured to me to see if those guides acually were successful.

Then I took a week off and headed to LA for a break. I met up with a friend who worked at Warner Brothers. I got a tour of the office and saw something interesting in the Harry Potter area.

An entire wall was devoted to crazy stuff. It looked like a Bennigans or something. There were pictures of animals, swatches of cloth, logos of movies, just what seemed like random stuff spread out over the whole wall.

On closer examination, they had split the wall into four vertical sections - each of the four school houses. The stuff on the walls had no connection to the Harry Potter franchise at all. What they had done is pick things, colors, textures and so on that felt like each of the four houses. This entire wall was an inspirational style guide for the designers and artists! As I mentioned, this is an older tool I just hadn't known about at the time; it's called a mood board, but WB's was a whole wall.

Now since then, I learned that variations of this are a fairly common technique, but it was new to me. I took that approach and completely redesigned the Style Guides at my old company. Artists wrote to my boss (skipped me completely) mentioning that this Guide was incredibly useful. They wanted the other product lines to use something similar. So, score one for me.

After leaving that field, I'd forgotten all about this technique. But just yesterday it popped into my head. And I thought that I could dig this out of mothballs and apply the technique on the main characters in my book.

Pics of actors or anyone who looks like the character, hairstyles, favorite foods, clothing, eyes, and other sensory details. Just random little things that feel like they're tied to a given character.

So that's it. It's simple. It's very doable. It could be done in small stages, and it could be done on my iPad. I just don't want it to distract me from actually writing the story.