I have lately been making a fair amount of progress on my copy of the Dune board game.  The Spice Harvest components are complete (though not printed), and I have lately been spending most of my time on The Duel board. 

Like the Ticket to Ride: Iceland board, I’ve been pouring quite a bit of effort into the Duel board, and it’s slow going.  I know a large part of it is my lack of graphics design training, so it takes me a few tries to get something that looks good.  Luckily, I have a model (the main Dune board from Ilya Baranovsky), but I still struggle with what is ok to deviate and what I should match.

My other challenge has been learning Adobe Photoshop.  I’ve been trying to move more of my graphic design work to Photoshop rather than Fireworks to take advantage of Photoshop’s richer bitmap editing and stronger layer capabilities.  Over the course of this project (and a couple of other smaller projects over the last few months), I think that I am finally as proficient in Photoshop as I am in Fireworks, so I can be comfortable starting a project there rather than Fireworks.  The main regret that I have is switching to a proprietary storage format over rich pngs, but I’ve been wondering lately how transferrable the rich pngs that Fireworks produces really are anyway.

At the end of the day, as I work through this project, I feel like I am learning more about how to do design work.  While I won’t claim that I’m by any means good yet, I’m figuring out how to do the things that I want faster and making them look better (to me, at least).