Hey Puzzle Friends!
It's time to dive into another designer diary; this time featuring Bumfuzzled #20, tackling the design challenges of a towering puzzle burger!
The Design Approach
While I sometimes approach a puzzle from a certain type of connecting style I'd like to try out, or a vision of a certain solve strategy, this one was purely theme. I just plain thought it would be fun to do a giant cheeseburger as a puzzle!
Illustrative puzzles like this are both easy and difficult. They're easy from an illustrative standpoint, as I already have an idea of what I want to puzzle to look like, vs. a puzzle that's more mechanically inspired. I'll get to the challenging part later!
While drawing a burger is relatively easy, the main illustrative challenge with a burger is making it visually interesting, as it can easily look like just a bunch of thin layers stacked up. So, features like lettuce that protrudes from the edges, dripping sauce, and some of the trimmings spilling out are super important, as they add asymmetry and visual interest.
Additionally, the idea of a vintage neon cafe sign was there from the beginning. The super tall burger was a bit on the narrow side, and the sign both adds visual interest and fills out the overall composition.
Here was the first sketch I paused at and scanned in, which is actually quite developed already!
Tackling the Challenge of Connecting
I mentioned that there is a challenging aspect of illustrative puzzles, and that is trying to make them connect in a way that interferes with the illustration as little as possible.
For a burger, fortunately there are a few ways to hide the connections with a little artistic license. The lettuce can be made extremely squiggly, making for super solid connections. The cheese can be a cheese with holes in it, providing opportunity for connections. The sauce can have very accentuated drips, allowing those drips to be grabby.
As you can see, this still left quite a few areas where I was left with a straight edge against another straight edge, where I'd inserted plain old connectors. I realized later I didn't need them, which is why iterating is so important!
I also decided to stick with squiggly connectors for much of the rest of the design, making it trickier to know whether something was a bun/bun or lettuce/lettuce connection vs. a bun/lettuce connection.
Further Development
After my first crack, there was a couple areas I didn't love.
First, the top bun looked boring. Some sesame seed drop outs did the trick, while also making the bun a bit trickier to assemble!
I also added a star to the bottom right of the neon sign, which helped the composition with a bit of asymmetry, as well as solidifying the vintage burger joint idea.
I also started working on eliminating as many of those visually interruptive connectors as possible through various bridge connectors (a piece that connects two otherwise unconnected pieces), also realizing the neon sign was going to act as a frame that would hold a lot of stuff together.
The Final Garnish!
A lot of my design time is in the small details, meaning I do a lot of retracing, smoothing out problem areas as I go. As you can imagine, there are a ton of details in each puzzle, and a lot of things are only caught when physically tracing over each of those details, as your eyes get pretty overwhelmed if you just try to scan the design for problems.
One last iteration, and the design was pretty much complete! This last iteration was lots of small tweaks, and of course segmenting the neon sign into pieces (I did the final connectors for this section digitally, as I wanted all of the connectors to be an exact match to each other). I also added a bit of lettering to the sign (the B and R from "burger").
I also see here I must have done one last iteration after this, but I can't find it in my records (I designed this puzzle a year and a half ago), as I see some refinements in the final puzzle that aren't in this sketch. If you like playing "Where's Waldo?", there's an added piece of cheese in particular that provided some crucial connection points, acting as a "super bridge" that keeps 4 pieces tightly in place!
Why Samples are Important...
After deciding on colors, digitizing the linework, and shooting it all to my manufacturer, a few weeks later I had the below sample in my hands!
Can you spot the problem? This is why production samples are incredibly important!
(Hint: check out the burger patty that's the second one from the top.)
The Final Feast!
A quick email to my manufacturer, and a couple more weeks, the problem is resolved, and we're off to the races (you'll have to search the photo for the corrected piece)!
I hope you enjoy the burger as much as I do. I'd never spent weeks crafting a burger before, but the final result was completely worth it!
Love and blessings,
Chad
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