Merchandising Development: Mug Development

As I am lead of marketing and I have created the main character for our game I have decided to create some merch that focuses on using the character in different scenarios that could be place onto t-shirts, mugs etc. I will also be using a range of asset designs created by the others that would also feature on the designs and some that will be adapted to the art style we have been using to be featured on their own which means I will be working with other members closely to make sure I stay true to what they have created. As we are a game company, I will also go some merch featuring our logos for both our company and game.

For the majority of the project I will be looking into websites such as Vistaprint to create a variety of items that could be produced and sold to our target audience, this gives me a great base to work on to test how out items will looks on the chosen object and to get the scale of how much room I have to play with in terms of design.

For this example, I have been looking into a heat changing mug so I have taken the dimensions and set a Photoshop file to fit and scale the image I want to use for the mug.

To finely see how the item will look like I went through the process to create the mug and look at the preview to see how well it fits, however it is not quite how I want the mug to work as it’s a single image that is completely black and is only revealed with heat.

To get an idea of how other pieces of march are designed I will be looking at a Minecraft mug and an Xbox mug created Paladone who are commonly used to create officially licensed merchandise from popular games, Tv shows and movies.

Luckily for myself I proudly own a few and these are the two that stand out for me in terms of how they are designed, even though there are a wide range of others that have different styles these are the ones I will be looking at. With the Minecraft mug you can see that with the sky and the main features on the mines are hidden with black thermal paint and until you pour hot water in them like I have done in the image it reveals hidden features which is very interesting to look at if you’re a fan of the game but weather it is hot or cold the image stays the same. As for the Xbox mug there are two separate images being shown on the mug, in black it features all the buttons and when it fades it reveals a game controller with popular weapons that are used in games for the Xbox making it more wide spread to people who like gaming and not just one game.

For my design of a heat changing mug I decided to go for an image that is Cosmo with a dark helmet and black space to one that fades revealing the female (Later on choice of male) face of Cosmo and a colourful galaxy behind her. By using Vistaprint and the power of photoshop I have created examples of how the image would look as a whole and a rough demonstration of how the mug will face if it was real.

Another mug I currently have in my collection is a red Super Mario heat changing mug that uses a different form of design by covering the majority of the image in colour with a silhouette of the character that shows a part of it, once heated the mug then reveals the whole picture using the same side scrolling platform theme that is seen withing the game.

For the second mug design I have used features created by the Owen Neighbour and Liam Miller to show off other main features of out game. With this design I will be using the Mario mug as inspiration by having two large images ether side accept it will have the games title in the middle.

For the cold section of the mug I made dark blue with speckles of stars that match the hot back ground. When it changes into hot it reveals the white logo and a full galaxy scene created by Owen Neighbour and edited by me to expand the look across the mud with the dark background altered with pink and blue shades to add more interesting colours.

The is the final result of the second variant of the heat changing mug, showing how it will work if water is poured into it.

As the range of custom make your own sites for the public only offer basic mugs that fade from solid black simple designs are most likely to be produced however, it is also an option to reach out to people like Paladone in the future to get them professionally made to our specification with improvements for a full mug cover over that could potentially be sold online or in game based stores.