background, process, art, puzzles

April 12, 2022 10:27 AM

Graphic designer Justin Ladia served as the Art Director of the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. His lengthy retrospective includes fun art, spoilers for some puzzles (which you can play online), and a fascinating, detailed start-to-finish case study of what it takes to direct the art for a big complicated collection of mostly-online experiences.

From the piece:

From this exercise, I distilled these goals and desires into four distinct values to help us with decisions related to art and design. In short, we wanted the Art of the Hunt to be: Immersive, Polished, Accessible, and Delightful.....

as I was taking the time to draw the Stata Center as accurately as possible, I would regularly curse Frank Gehry under my breath because it became excruciating to illustrate. I used to not mind his work, but that’s all changed after this.....

When solvers finish the last required puzzle of the Ministry, the Fruit Around, they learn that to tame “The Voracious Bookwyrm” they have to “feed it a new berry”, which is a reference to the Newbury Medal, the prize for Children’s Literature.....

I gave Sam a fairly loose brief: I just said that it needed to reference Penn Station’s architecture and to include references to books and writing. Sam responded by placing books throughout the art (including in the very back where they’re arranged haphazardly), adding bankers lamps for lighting, having the railings be made of fountain pens, incorporating library catalog drawers as a structural element, and putting in a library catalog card of sorts on the left-hand side. It’s the only area of the Hunt that really spells out the book theme, which is something I actively tried to avoid with all the other regions. I felt, however, that it was appropriate here considering how I wanted this part of Bookspace to feel “transitional” and represent multiple literary genres......

The collection of icons that make up the map are also frames, some traditional and others not. In the original concept, when a puzzle is available, a silhouette of a person can be seen in the frame. I was (maybe overly) fearful that by doing that, we would spoil the experience of the meta solve so instead we shifted to the idea of having unavailable puzzles show up with white noise to exemplify that the frame needed to be “fixed”. When the puzzle is solved, the frame is instead filled with a vibrant gradient indicating that the frame was able to be filled with a person.....

When we started the process, a few members of DAD were excited to produce art content for the Hunt and some started to iterate ideas on the coin fairly early on. Because of this level of enthusiasm from several members, I wanted to make sure people felt like they contributed to the design of the Coin so I had decided to make the process democratic and have the team openly suggest ideas. It was around August/September when I asked people for suggestions, and at that time, some of the absentee members have already dropped off. We ended up having suggestions from four other team members, and we implemented all of them. I took what the team had suggested, added a few ideas of my own, and drew up a Coin that met my requirements for what characteristics I think a well-designed Coin should have: namely, it needs to be intricate, geometric, and filled to the brim with details. Doing the brainstorming for the design democratically allowed us to pack the Coin with details and achieve that level of intricacy I was looking for, but having just one person design the Coin allowed it to have a singular focus and point-of-view.....

When I looked up the solve sounds from the last two years (it only started being a “thing” in 2020), I had noticed that each one had three distinct parts: some sort of “correct” sound effect like a bell or a chime; a musical “sting” that’s thematic to the round; and a crowd’s applause. In the previous two years, the bell or chime had been the same throughout the Hunt, but this year I also wanted to make that thematically appropriate if possible.....

posted by brainwane (2 comments total)

Love this!!

I'm a member of Palindrome, and help put on the hunt this year. Justin is *amazing* and was such a vital part of what made the hunt so fantastic this year. I got so much hunt merchandise (stickers, post cards, t-shirts, etc.) this year, which, I probably would've anyway, but it's just such a bonus that it's all gorgeous.

When I looked up the solve sounds from the last two years (it only started being a “thing” in 2020), I had noticed that each one had three distinct parts: some sort of “correct” sound effect like a bell or a chime; a musical “sting” that’s thematic to the round; and a crowd’s applause. In the previous two years, the bell or chime had been the same throughout the Hunt, but this year I also wanted to make that thematically appropriate if possible.....

We did a bunch of speed runs of the hunt to test run the site, which meant hearing the "Hooray you got the answer correct!" music over and over again as we were frantically entering in answers to test things. It was delightful with all of the different stings; the Lizzo "good as hell" one for New You City was my favorite.

If you're new to mystery hunts, or trying to figure out what they are, the Star Rats prologue is a great place to get your feet wet.
posted by damayanti at 12:26 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had a similar role in making the 2015 hunt happen, and I wish I'd written as detailed an account as this! It's all fading into the pleasant haze of memory at this point. Kudos to Palindrome and to Justin's art direction :D
posted by rivenwanderer at 12:25 PM on April 13, 2022