With the 2015 Unown Awards officially wrapping, I thought this would be a fun thread to create to give a little look back at past years' Unown Award designs and talk a little bit about my creative process.

So, the Unown Awards go way WAY back, but were revived in 2007. TPM has now had the annual Unown Awards for longer than it didn't, let that sink in. Since then, we've had 4 different hosts, and I've been doing the designs since 2009.

Dark-San hosted in 2007, with that year's designs being rather simple, taking the Unown sprite itself and sticking it on a base with the year 2007 thrown on there.



However, 2008 saw a more complex design. A glow effect was added and the ! and ? Unowns were added to the mix. Those two have been given their own unique color scheme every year since.



After I started doing the Unown designs in 2009, I decided to go back and redo the 2007 and 2008 ones to match my style and specifications, specifically:
-64x64 pixels
-Transparent background
-Same base position for each

The 2007 ones were pretty straightforward, all I did was crop them from 65x65 to 64x64 (a 1-pixel shave!), deleted the white background and moved them so that all of their bases line up.



2008 was a bit more of a challenge. I shrunk them down, which distorted the base for some of them so I deleted that and redid it. Also, it turns out, these had a background too, it just matched the background color of our forums. The problem was that if the forum style ever changed, that background would become visible. Because of the glow, simply deleting the background wouldn't work, it would have left the Unown looking like it had a weird dark border around it on light backgrounds. So, to take care of that I got rid of the original glow and completely redid it using the PNG format's alpha blending feature (for those who aren't familiar with the technical lingo of image editing, alpha blending means making part of the image translucent).



It ended up being a lot more work than I anticipated, but the end result was worth it.

Coming up...

In 2009 with Dark-San's absence, talk about continuing the Unown Awards with a different host started stirring amongst the staff. This led to a quick design process for the next set of Unowns.