We asked designer Stephen Reichert to give us a little behind the scenes look at the new VALVE Presents: The Sacrifice and Other Steam-powered Stories and this awesome piece reveals the wonderful world of design.
When Valve and Dark Horse decided to team up to bring this 208-page hardcover collection to life, I couldn’t have been happier. Being what many would consider a hardcore gamer, I leapt at the chance to work on a project featuring the web comics of some of my absolute favorite worlds as interpreted by some of the finest creative minds in comic books.
The goal was to design a book that didn’t adhere to one game’s brand, but to more closely resemble Valve’s look since there was a good chance that this would turn into a multivolume collection, each presenting the stories of multiple games. I was given the cover art from Valve and it was time to figure out the title treatment.
I went a few different directions with the logo, but it was eventually decided that the more simple, the better. It needed to be instantly recognizable as a Valve book to fans, while grabbing the attention of anyone who passed by it in a comics shop or bookstore. After some more fine-tuning and a bit of collaboration with Valve, the cover treatment was complete and all that was left to do was design the rest of the book!
It was decided that we should go with something mechanical and clean to reflect the developer’s aesthetic, and focus on neutral tones to further push the concept that this book didn’t belong to any one game. For chapter title pages, art from the comics was used to tie the design and story together. Various logo elements were also utilized to not only make each chapter recognizable from the others, but to help transport each fan into the universe they know so well. The final design was approved and ready to be sent to the printer!
All in all, this turned out to be a really fun project, topped off by a celebratory Portal-themed cake baked by Dark Horse’s Rachel Edidin, editor of this fine collection. As it turned out, the cake wasn’t a lie.
Stephen Reichert