This is some concept art I came up with for a game that was in development at FPC a few months ago. The game is a social dice game where you roll all the dice and people call out matching groups of dice by shape, color, and number.
For the design I borrowed the foundational aspects of game play -- shape and color -- and used them as the basis for the branding and packaging.
Branding concept
Shapes for the sides of the dice.
I though it would be cool to package the dice in a cube-shaped box and illustrate the sides with geometric shapes in colors evocative of the dice themselves.
The first color scheme I picked looked nice but the colors were not immediately recognizable by name, which would make game play clunky and less intuitive. Players need to be able to call out colors and shapes without having to think about what the correct name for that particular shade of pea green is.
Nice colors, but not easy enough to name when you're under pressure. "Orange star!" "Pink moon!" "Puce flower!" "That's not puce." "Really? It looks like puce." "Not puce." "What is puce?" etc., etc......
Second color scheme. Similar to first but colors are more easily distinguishable from one another which is crucial for game play.
Eventually it was decided that the direction I was headed in was not targeted enough at the bigger buyers and we needed a more commercial, slightly less "high end" look and feel. It's always disappointing when an idea gets scrapped because it is "too nice", but apparently you have to sell games in order to make money. Crazy. Really fun project, though!