About:
Hikaru no Go is one of my favorite manga - I read it monthly in Shonen Jump! That's why I knew I had to do a layout featuring it; to share my love of the comic with the world!! Lol XD While reading the magazine, I came across this picture of Sai, Hikaru, and Akira (shown left to right above). I thought it was so cool looking that I searched for it on the internet just so I could use it as a layout, hehe.

The colors are very intense and vibrant but the background is simply white with black divider lines. When working with the design, one of the problems I had to overcome was trying to get the simplicity of the background to meld well with the strong reds, pinks, blues, and yellows. So why not change that background to become more colorful? The answer lies in the essence of the manga. Hikaru no Go is about a boy who plays go, a game originating in Japan and played on a board with intersecting lines. The pieces you place on the board are small black and white stones. So the black and white colors form sort of a symbol of the game. Now to get the bright colors of the top picture to work together with the black and white hues. I simply faded the color out of the pic towards the bottom right corner. You can also see the color missing from the sakura tree that overlaps the info box in the top right. Overall, I think I succeeded more or less. The colors still turned out a bit too intense for my liking, but I think the branch that overlaps the info box is very strong.

A few of the graphics I created myself. The overlapping tree mentioned above had to be forced to overlap XD All I did was feather a selection around one of the branches, cut and paste, and repeat. It turned out really nice, looking like it was part of the original picture. I created the go pieces -- black and white stones at the top of each box. As mentioned before, the simple black and white colors of the background were not an accident. I wanted them to represent the colors of the game itself. So making two go pieces and using them as a divider helped establish the idea more.

As a whole, I like this version. It's simple but works well. The only downside was that it was up for a very long time @_@ After months of looking at it, it's time for a change!