Chess Piece Design

I began by creating a base and floating symbols which related to the current archetype of a chess set (eg: the bishop was made from the bishop hat shape, the profile of the knight showed the silhouetted of a horse etc).


A major design problem I had with this chess set was the scale. The pieces had to be big enough to fit the bases but the overall size had to match the hierarchy of the pieces, with the king and queen biggest and the pawns smallest. The natural sizes of the pieces were not lending themselves towards alterations in scale.


After trying and failing to make the scale of the pieces work I decided to go back to my original brainstorm and try building a cityscape themed chess set, with the buildings as the pieces.


For the king piece, I wanted it to have a circular top, similar to n observation floor. I experimented with combining the emboss tool with the revolve tool in 3D effects but did not have a satisfactory result. After some consideration I decided that the poster design would dictate the look of the king piece, not the other way around.

Chess Poster Research

To start this project I began by researching older styles of chess. I began by looking at minimalist styles from Eastern Europe and Asia and the more traditional, rounded styles that we see as standard today.
I then researched more modern styles of chess sets, based around modern culture, events, industrialisation and modern innovations in design.In the final chess set, the light wooden tops and the heavy metal bases keep the pieces perfectly balanced and do not allow them to fall over. I do not like the idea that you are unable to knock pieces over once you have taken them, but this design did encourage me to look at more surreal chess set and I was inspired to create a chess set where the pieces appeared to be floating over a base.