Self initiated menu brief - The puzzle idea

After completing the menu and the masks I sort of wanted to make something else like an activity sheet of some kind that kids could do whilst they were waiting for their food. I remember looking at Thomas Flintham's work a while back and he has had many of his puzzle books published so I thought he would be a good place to start.

His puzzles and mazes are super effective and are really nice to look at. In my sketch folder you can see some basic concepts that I had come up with for a wrestling belt themed maze. below is my digital mock of what the maze section would look like.

The idea was to start at the entrance on the left part of the belt and work your way along to the middle and then out along the far right hand side. The centre maze would have extra paths going along to fill the circular space and I had thought about maybe adding wrestling mask in the middle, not unlike the logo for the menu. I used a program online that generated a square space, it then allowed me to carve various pathways into the shape and then all I had to do was screen shot it and use it as a guide for the digital sketch. In this case I actually found it easier to take the shape and lock off the pixels and then change the colour to whatever I please. The two side panels are constructed of four individually designed mazes and then merged to make a larger one, the middle section is a scaled up version of the smaller maze sections.

After a lot of thought I decided that I did not want to carry on with this idea as everything felt a little too artificial and although I made the mazes myself there was this feeling that made me feel like the mazes were not my own which obviously threw me off. My lecturers also mentioned that this kind of thing did not really match with the other images that I had made for this brief. So the maze idea pretty much ended there and then, it was a cool idea but not for the audience that I am aiming for, also I can do better than this.

Enter the colouring sheet idea. This was a lot simpler to do and a lot more effective, I thought it would be a good idea to name characters that are on the menu, they could have a favourite food and maybe a strength level as to tell who is the strongest, sort of like Trump cards. This one is called Fancy Pants and he was just traced from a section on the back of my menu, I have also added the challenge of finding him on the menu and a tick box to show that you have found him. The background elements were just made up to fit his body shape, they reflect the elements from the menu but I mixed them up to make him harder to find.

Sadly Fancy Pants is the only one I have had time to create for this deadline but there is nothing stopping me from making the whole team in the same style. That way if anyone wanted to take this design and make it a reality then I would already have the activity sheets finished.  Now to contextualize everything.