Designing For A Crowded Shelf What Party Game Illustration Can Teach You About Standing Out

Creative Boom: Resources The Edit Luke McConkey on what making box art for a game can teach you about standing out The illustrator talks pencils, party fun, and pitching the perfect box art for Alley Cat Games' What The Sketch? Written By: Tom May 5 August 2026 Party games live or die on their box art. Before anyone reads a rule or shuffles a card, they've already decided, in about two seconds, whether the thing on the shelf looks fun. That's a lot of pressure to put on a few illustrated characters and a logo. And it's exactly the brief illustrator Luke McConkey took on for Alley Cat Games' drawing and guessing game, What The Sketch?

The game itself is simple: one player becomes the art teacher, describing an object using only basic shapes, while everyone else races to draw and guess what it is. Luke's job was to give it a look that could grab people in a genre already packed with strong competition. The project started, as these things often do, with a friendly email. "Caezar, who runs Alley Cat Games, reached out and said they had a project they thought I'd be a great fit for, and we just started from there," Luke recalls. He's fond of that early stage of a job, before the deadlines and revisions kick in. "It's always lovely those first few interactions," he enthuses.

"You get the little excitement of a new enquiry, meeting new people, learning about awesome new projects." Creative process Ask Luke how he actually builds a character, and the answer is less methodical than you might expect. Rather than starting with a tight plan, he lets the pencil move first and waits to see what happens. "A lot of it comes from not thinking too much about each individual. I'll let the pencil start moving and when a bit of shape starts to form, get into the detail," he explains. Personality comes later, once a rough shape has emerged from the page.

"Once I start seeing a character coming out of the blobs, I start adding personality in my head, giving them a name, what they're like, what stuff they're into." Each pass builds on the last, with characters taking shape gradually rather than arriving fully formed. He seems genuinely amused by the process: "Kinda cool seeing what my funky brain has bubbling away underneath!" That doesn't mean, though, that this wasn't a big challenge. Party games are a brutal market to design for. Walk into any games shop, and the shelves are stacked with bright, competing box art, all fighting for the same three seconds of attention.

Luke did his homework before starting, visiting both big and small games shops to see what he was up against. "Geez, it's tough out there!" he says. "It really is a tough brief when you've got so much awesome stuff from amazing artists and game publishers trying to grab people's attention at the same time." His solution wasn't to chase trends or second-guess what was already on the shelf. "It's about staying true to what you and the client want to do rather than playing shadow games to manoeuvre around competition and what's come before," he believes. "Just putting love into something goes a long way, I think.

People can sense when you've done something from the heart, versus strategically trying to second-guess stuff." Matching the mechanics Some briefs feel like a natural fit, and this was one of them. What The Sketch? has players drawing quick shapes and shouting out guesses the moment something clicks, which, as it turns out, isn't far off Luke's own working method. "The mechanics of the game resonated with how I work," she says. "You draw a bunch of shapes quickly and then jump and shout when it looks like a thing.

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The article discusses the importance of design in a competitive market, which is significant for brand strategy professionals, though the concepts of visual identity and packaging are established practices.