This critique required us to assess four main points:

1. How their avatar fits into the virtual world of the OASIS from Ready Player One
2. Why they feel the drawing style used to depict their avatar is appropriate.
3. Why their graphic design and typography choices make their poster design clear and engaging
4. How specific Illustrator tools and techniques influenced their creative process

I chose to do Hannah’s project. Her character wields a sword and shield, and she appears to be wearing some sort of armor. So, I assume her avatar is some sort of warrior in the OASIS, possibly a participant in the Easter Egg hunt. Hannah is still developing her character’s backstory so more of her history is still open to debate. Personally, I think the drawing style used to depict the character is done great. It’s a bit cartoony, which fits well with the setting of Ready Player One, in which the characters are heavily influenced by their activity in the OASIS world, where you can look like whatever you want – and that includes cartoony. Cartoony depictions of characters in video games is also incredibly common. Many popular video games are drawn in an animated sort of style, which Hannah’s drawing fits right into. Font is not yet present in Hannah’s poster. Hopefully, she will add some interesting font later that cleverly describes why her sword, shield and outfit are important. But her layout is clear in which she distinctly separates her avatar’s weapons, the sword and shield, from her body to show them more visibly off to the viewer. They are not hidden behind the character or ambiguous in any way. The character is clearly at the top of the list in terms of hierarchy, with her weapons second, as they are smaller and less blaring to the viewer. I like her use of color; her black armor matches any color she would wish to pair it with. I also like that her avatar’s blue eyes contrast with the warm colors of her weapons and boots. I can see that Hannah used a variety of tools and colors in Illustrator. She clearly used some sort of pen or brush tool to draw the outline of her character. Perhaps she used the blob brush or some sort of fill to color in her lines. I can see a lot of use of the gradient tool, especially on the yellow and red designs of her armor, sword, shield, and boots. It looks as if she implemented some sort of stamp or template to create the little star designs on her boots and shield. Or, she could have used any shape tool to carve out the star object and copy it to other parts of her avatar. Overall it looks as if she experimented quite a bit with the many tools of Adobe Illustrator.