Why do I bring this to your attention?  I design for online games.  And I love fashion.  And recently I was watching a friend play a video game the other day and it dawned on me:  Cross-pollination of fashions appears quite prevalent between the Dead Space 2 console game and the recent clothing line designs by French clothing designer Thierry Mugler.  It’s so apparent, that you wouldn’t be able to notice which clothes are in the netherworld or on the runway.

Isaac, Dead Space 2 character, and his wonderful mutant monster enemies are compelling.  Isaac’s getup falls in a world of gothicism and unpolished tech.  He wears a coat of blood and gore just like we wear a raincoat.  Isaac is really tall, about 6.5 feet. It looks like he’s always about to start a brawl.  He glows and his body is covered head to toe with metal armor.  You see a lot of similar people on the street but they’re wearing metallic stud encrusted shoes and jackets from department stores and Soho boutiques.  It’s their own type of armor.

Mugler’s Fall 2011 collection operated around the theme of black latex, savages, and skeletons; which is similar to the spawn of Dead Space 2.  Mugler’s models were also covered head to toe in tattoos just like Isaac is covered in gore, it’s like they could be friends.  It seems they spent their life savings at the tattoo parlor to get ready for this show.  It’s so real it’s sinister and chilling.

Another designer that seems to cross-pollinate fashion with video games is Swedish designer Patrik Soderstam. Soderstam likes to color with clothing and crosses style with Nintendo Wii games like Wario Smooth Moves and Wii’s Mii characters.  Combining Wii and Soderstam is like reincarnating those inflatable beach toys from the 99-cent store into todays fashions!

What can all this lead to?  Will people start dressing like video game characters instead of movie stars?  Maybe our bodies will gradually evolve into pixels, who knows!  Our virtual world allows for a network between clothing and video games.  With this hybrid set in stone today, I do believe that the future will bring a lot more fun fashions for both video games… and ourselves.

The other presenters were all excellent, and we really enjoyed hearing about some of the games and platforms that will be coming to market in the near future.  But I will freely admit that we were really amped to showcase Radballs.  As Neil, Jan and Andy took to the podium to begin the presentation, I heard Neil start to explain the inspiration for our music-driven action puzzle game and I observed the audience.  When Andy started playing the game I watched as the onlookers started bobbing their heads along with the music, smiling and remarking to one another.  The game looked and sounded amazing, and we weren’t the only ones who noticed.

When the Q&A portion began, there were a number of compliments paid to the game, people interested in talking with the developers afterwards and excitement about a unique and fun game being released for iOS.  The promotional buttons we handed out were also a big hit, with some people even coming back to make sure they collected all of the Radballs.  However, our favorite moment of the night came when an audience member asked if players were limited to the songs that came with the game.  When Neil informed her that players are able to import music from their iTunes library, she followed up by asking if imported music can really be affected by the game play and scratched by the player.  Neil assured her that this was the case, to which she replied, “That’s awesome.”

Actually, it’s Rad.

I know I don’t speak alone when I say I would love to see Indesign’s link panel implemented into Photoshop. The ability to import external linked images into Indesign has been one of the most useful features I’ve come across and is poorly lacking in Photoshop’s smart objects. Although powerful, we would still have to open 20+ files just to change the color of a header from red to blue.

BUT WAIT! No need to zap your little Frankenshop to life yet. Check out these following tutorials on Photoshop Variables: the poorly named equivalent to Indesign Links! Although Variables are a bit more complicated, it sure beats suffering the consequences when your mutant program becomes self-aware. Eeek!

ADOBE VARIABLE BASICS:
All you need to know about linking out to an external .psd.

• Importing an external header .psd that will update over many mockups: http://bit.ly/9vvg1R

• Similar tutorial: http://bit.ly/fUbmNo

ADOBE VARIABLES & EXCEL:
Check out these tutorials about using excel spreadsheets in conjunction with variables.

• Create Mailing Labels: http://bit.ly/bo1N4L

• YouTube Video: http://youtu.be/bJV6ug1npyQ

Download the script here, and add it to your Adobe Extensions manager. Reopen Photoshop and voila! It will be under Window > Extensions. Fire it up, give it a few minutes and boom! No more annoying “copy 1,2,3…” and the resulting hair pulling.  It works for MAC and Windows.  No more of this…

Now, in retrospect, Photoshop has really made our lives so much easier,  so to bash Adobe’s poor decision making in adding “copy” to duplicated layers seems trivial. Just like the most current generation will never know what it was like to blow into a Nintendo Cartridge to get it to work, my generation will never know what it was like to design without the aid of the computer. Phototypesetting, paste-ups, rub-on lettering are these panels in Illustrator or something?

Anyway, thank you to Mike Hale for making all of our lives a bit easier, maybe you can make an extension to better Photoshop’s Pen tool? *Hint* *Hint*