Marilyn Hager illustrated and created the production design for the 20 x 31" full-color game board, 412 full color cards, guidebook, audio tape, packaging for the boxed set and publicity materials.

Project challenges and unique characteristics:
Production for such a large game board posed considerable challenges with digital illustrations. Marilyn used Painter and Photoshop with clipping paths to draw and transfer images to QuarkXpress where they were pasted onto the game board to deal with image files sizes that would have been astronomical if drawn as one big drawing. She used Freehand to create the line art for the cards that were laid-out in QuarkXpress. Marilyn worked closely with the good folks at Yaquinto Printing in Dallas, TX to design and figure the most cost-effective approach to production of the project.

Marilyn designed and illustrated the front cover of boxed set, created production design for full-color 16.5 x 8.5" 2-sided game board, 28 tiles, designed the interior pages, cover, packaging and publicity materials and produce typesetting for the 6 x 9" 176-page illustrated hard cover book.

Project challenges and unique characteristics:
The egyptian theme has been a lifelong fascination for Marilyn. She loved using colored pencils, that became watercolor when wetted, to emulated the feeling of stone for the rendering of the piece of ancient egyptian jewelry on the cover of the package box sleeve and interior game board box. She used accents of metallic gold spot inks to enhance the traditional egyptian palette on the game board.

Production of the playing pieces posed the biggest challenge. We wanted an ivory feeling to go along with the ancient middle eastern flavor but certainly didn't want to use real ivory because of its unconscious environmental statement. We opted for ivory-colored resin tiles. The artwork from the interior book drawings had to be adjusted to the production techniques for stamping and hand-painting the images on the tiles, which was done overseas. Marilyn worked closely with the box engineers at Ivy Hill Packaging to create a box that went inside a sleeve to hold the game board with a shelf and a little cup indention to hold the playing pieces.

Marilyn created production design for 64 full-color cards, designed interior pages, cover, packaging and publicity materials and did typesetting for 6 x 9" 156-page illustrated soft cover book and designed the Words of Wizdom web site.

Project challenges and unique characteristics:
Jaya Moran's illustration style was playful and her brilliant use of color was exciting and uplifting. The palette she used was challenging to recreate in offset printing. Marilyn worked for the first time with Yaquinto Printing and with our long-standing partner, Prep SAT output bureau in Denver, CO to match her palette as closely as possible. We double-bumped the full coverage ink of the box to give us a fully saturated kelly green. Jaya's paintings were inspirational in providing design elements for the design of the borders of the cards and finding the exact font to best suit the whimsical nature of the project. The most enjoyable aspect of this project was creating the animations from the author's illustrations for the fairy cards section of Wizdom Books website.

Marilyn Hager's role in this project was to manage production design which included 78 full-color cards, render the frames for the interior book images based on Chris Guilfoil's paintings, design interior pages, book cover and complete all of the typesetting for the 6 x 9" 304-page illustrated hardcover book, as well as design the packaging and publicity materials.

Project challenges and unique characteristics:
Illustrations for each 4 x 6.25" card came to us as three separate element paintings on 8 x 12" masonite sheets. Because masonite is not flexible, the images had to be scanned on flatbed scanners and reassembled in QuarkXpress. Keep in mind that this was 1992 and computers were not what they are today. The cards in this set are purposely oversized to give the player a sense of the inner child's world in relationship to the large adult world. The illustrator is a painter, so the renderings of the frames of the cards for the interior black and white card examples were better represented by Marilyn's illustration style. She worked closely with the illustrator of the cards to create renderings that emulated his paintings but gave clear, crisp, printable images for the press.

Marilyn managed production design for 60 two-color cards, designed the interior pages, packaging and publicity materials and produced typesetting for 6 x 9" 224-page illustrated hard cover book.

Project challenges and unique characteristics:
The package design was the most inspired part Marilyn played in the production of this project. She used a fun and out-of-this-world font that we foil-stamped to emulate the silver metal of a flying saucer set on a night sky background of black and white ink, with a purple spot color from one of the cards, and a few star accents to create a clean and eye-catching shelf presentation.