🇮🇹 Summit On Tour III – Key Art

Five months from now, we hope to find ourselves walking across Pons Fabricius – a bridge that's just 38 years shy of celebrating its two thousandth anniversary – to the opening of the third edition of Summit On Tour in Rome. Meanwhile, today we are pleased to share with you the key art of the conference, and the brief story of how it was created.

Bandit Bandit

To design and develop On Tour III's key art, we again hired the Montréal-based studio Bandit Bandit, whom we love dearly. Typical of the games industry, the project involved a Russia-born, Lithuania-based producer working with a French-born, Canada-based artist for the Italian edition of the conference – the legacy business may be de-globalizing, but our industry continues to be powered by cross-border and cross-cultural collaborations.

Rome or Italy?

The first question that we had to address, was whether we aim to represent the country (Italy) or the city (Rome). A much as we love the Italian flag, we felt that the idea of "Italy" is way too broad for this conference, and we focused on the city instead.

The Symbol of Rome

Rome has several prominent symbols. We rejected the associations with the Roman Empire as leaning too heavily into the military theme, and settled on something which all of you probably very well know: Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city, and the she-wolf who raised them (which matches nicely the wolf mascot of the Summit):

When you're in Rome, the twins are everywhere: on the coins, among the statues, in bas-reliefs. A very recognizable idea... yet with a challenge of its own: how do we execute on it, without putting two naked babies on the cover?

The She-Wolf in the Future

We decided that Romulus and Remus could symbolize the young and vulnerable game developers, who then go on to found the multibillion games industry; and we, the lawyers, are the She-Wolf that nurtures startups into global businesses.

And, of course, the whole scene had to shift into the future – the environment would be cyberpunk, the she-wolf would a woman in a wolf-styled respirator (considering all the expected pandemics...), and the twin developers would be in the form of two small satellites whom she charges up from her battery. Here's how the first sketch turned out:

The first rendering of the wolf-styled respirator seemed a little harsh: we're not the class action bullies, or the litigation-funded liability lawyers, why all these teeth? And the developers-as-satellites seemed a bit hard to love (even though this may be true for some of the know-it-all, don't-need-any-advice Indies). Here's how the next revision worked out:

We loved the little androids powered up by the legal knowledge, and it was the time to develop the environment. The city of Rome, no mater how far into the future, will always have something scribbled on its walls: after all, even Pompeii is full of graffiti, and that was 2.000 years ago.

The Colors of Rome

With the concept finished, it was time to develop the colors.

The colors of Rome are the yellow and the red, which we sought to match:

The Ambiance and the Title

Next on, we worked on the surroundings – the ambiance of the Rome of the future – in combination with the style of the title. Paying tribute to the Italian series of Corto Maltese, we made the title of the event in the style of the comic books:

What was left, was to revise the color variations, and to see how this works for all the formats that we use at the conference (what we call "from bags to badges").

Poster Art

Here, then, is the art that we will bring to Rome in April (with a nod to the Italian flag, in the choice of allowing some green on the background):

We think of this image as representing the Italy's traditional world-famous creative industries helping the local games community grow, as well as highlighting the role of the legal teams in nurturing the development teams with advice, and emotional support, in their most challenging moments.

We'll print a bunch of these posters that we'll make available at the event. As to the functional use, we needed one more step to make it work: defining the key color.

Key Art

A color-rich key art works great for posters, but it starts to interfere when we need to announce the sessions, or to produce notebooks. For all these functional surfaces, we opted for l'azzurro, "the color of the sky on a clear day" that is also commonly used by Italy's national sports teams:

In the coming months, you'll see a lot of this blue in our communication. And we hope that you'll see exactly the same shade in the sky, when go for a walk in Villa Borghese on a clear and sunny day when the conference kicks off.

Registration Continues

Now that you, too, know the background story of how this art came about, you can join us in anticipating the first print tests. We also have the traditional enamel pin to design, a cherry on top of the whole art project.

In a few minutes, we'll publish the LinkedIn event for Summit On Tour III in Rome: if you plan to attend, you can see which of your connections are also going.

At the moment, we have allocated close to 50% of the available seats. If you work at a games company or at a law firm with games industry practice, we'd love to meet you there.

To apply, please fill the form HERE.

And in a couple of weeks, we will start to announce the event's sponsors. To have a look at the deck, please reach Alma Giedraitienė .

What's Next?

The 8th season of Legal Challenge, games industry's premiere moot court, is just a few days away from its grand opening. A clone – or an inspiration? Rights transferred – or rights retained? Red Dawn Entertainment s.r.l., based in the north of Africa, and Quantum Heaven, Inc., based in the Caribbean, are about to find out.

See you around!

// Sergei & the team at CO //