As much as I love writing, there's always been a part of me that is irrevocably and forever tied to art. Graphic design, sketching, and Photoshop have all been integral parts of my informative years, and even now, I love to draw, create and manipulate visual media.

For years, I tried to find a way to meld my love of gaming and my love of art in a way that felt meaningful and personal, but at the same time required a modicum of hard work without painful drudgery. I am a particular (and peculiar) sort, so happening upon the right project that hit all the right buttons was bound to take me years and a considerable amount of luck.

Two years ago, my girlfriend at the time linked me to a fantastic blog where the author had created a collage poster that displayed the covers for every book he had ever read. It was a visual masterpiece to say the least, and something so incredibly personal, only he could have made it.

"How could it apply to myself?" I asked her, and she suggested I make a poster of all the game I owned. Making a poster of all the games I had played would be completely impossible and require a memory I did not possess, and in practice, had no ingenious applications to aid in its implementation. I toyed with the idea, but at the time, still had no idea how I would go about creating it. I knew I could export details from game collection databases like Delicious Library or Gamepedia, but the artistic implementation still seemed unnecessarily laborious. I gave up on the idea, and moved on.

Struck again by the possibilities of the poster yet again just a week ago, I decided to go hunting for an application for Mac that could alleviate the time-consuming task of individually adding photos to a collage. I came upon Posterino. Designed essentially to create a photo collage on the fly, I could easily manipulate its features to make the poster I'd been wanting to make for two years. My ideas were finally going to see the light of day.

After starting up Posterino for the first time, I realized the best way to export the game covers into the program would be through Gamepedia's export feature. Exporting as an html file complete with .pngs for game covers, I segregated the game covers to their own folder, and pointed Posterino to it. I then picked a template that fit the quantity and type of photos I would be using, and let Posterino fill the template with photos at random.

What I soon found was that the largest template was a 365 day poster that could be used to catalogue photo experiences for exactly one year. Unfortunately, my game collection had swelled to almost 600 in the last year, and was ever growing. Disheartened, I closed Posterino, and perked myself up with a game of Dragon Quest IX.

I returned to Posterino the next day, intent on finding a way to bring the idea to life, and happened upon a portion of the program that allowed a user to custom create a collage based on a predefined grid: horizontal photos x vertical photos. I scaled the poster to 3'x2', and managed to fit in 593 photos, with a 7 photo space at the bottom right to write down a title for the poster. I chose "My.History". It seemed suitably computer-like in punctuation without losing the sentimentality that was inherent to the piece.

The project is far from done, though. After exporting my collection and its game covers from Delicious Library to Gamepedia, several covers were downscaled considerably, making them a pixelated mess when the poster was viewed at actual size.

How did I fix it? It's certainly no secret, but I do want to save future information and progress for another post. To keep people at bay, I decided to upload a photo of Posterino with the poster as a work-in-progress.

Stay tuned for next week, when I detail more on the process behind the poster, and even onward into the printing process.