I began designing the 2010 Unown Awards almost as soon as the 2009 ones were given out! Knowing that 2010 would mark our 10th anniversary, I wanted these to be special. I decided early on that I wanted to give them a gold base, and figured I'd put the year on top to balance the base. Over the next several months, I came up with a few prototypes.



You can see how the design evolved. The base went from mimicking the 2007 one to the 2008 one, but the year stayed the same. The pokeball images that I used for the zeroes in the year were the same as the ones that I used as the bullet points on the main site. The decision to use pokeballs for the zeroes came directly from the 10th anniversary logo I had created.



Also, the only difference between the last two were some minor tweaks to the base. I was already at the point where I was only making minor changes, but, to use a Nintendo expression, I "updended the tea table" and decided to go in a completely different direction.



As I was experimenting with different styles for the main site, I became pretty fond of the glass look and wanted to incorporate it into the Unown Award designs. I considered making the Unowns themselves transparent, but I wanted to use a reflection effect, so I decided to make the base look like it was made of glass instead. The Unowns themselves became gold, which I did by altering the sprites, and the year moved to the bottom, and there was a good reason for this. If the Unowns had sat directly on the base, I would have had to make a reflection for each of them, but by putting the year below them, I only needed to create one reflection for that. Then, all I had to do was create a single template and add each Unown to it to create the awards. Some other details I thought I'd point out is that there is a slight yellow tint (gray for ? and !) to the base. This was added when I noticed that the glass effect wasn't convincing enough, and I realized that it should be reflecting the yellow glow of the Unowns. Also, the reflection of the year isn't directly below it, but there is actually a slight gap. This is because in real life, when something reflects off of glass, it usually reflects off the bottom of it rather than the top, so that gap makes it look more realistic.

As for the ! and ? Unowns. Well, as usual, they were given their own color scheme. With Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver coming out in 2010, I thought I'd give that a nod and make them silver with the other ones being gold. I even took it a step further and made the year gold on them, with the zeros in the year being GS balls. Later years would continue to see designs based on the pokemon games that came out that year.

Coming up...

Prototypes, prototypes, prototypes! A design I couldn't quite nail down as unused ideas from 2010 resurfaced.