Location art design at Hidden Door

A behind-the-scenes look at...well...the scenes

April 23, 2026 by Megan Carlsen

As Art Director for Hidden Door, I helped solve several refreshingly unique visual challenges. One of my favorites was driving the look of the location art for our cards alongside the brilliant freelance illustrator and designer Harrison Gerard. It was a delight to see him bring worlds both familiar and new to life in a well-researched, efficient, expressive, refreshing way. Here's a detailed breakdown of how we worked together to develop location art assets for the places you can explore in Hidden Door's world catalog.

From a design perspective the assets had several clear needs. Practically, they needed to read well at a small scale to be effective on mobile devices. As a small team with big aspirations and frequent content updates, we needed to select an approach that allowed us to make lots of high quality work quickly. Since a player can take their story in so many different directions on the Hidden Door platform, the locations needed to be an anchor for a concept more than a meticulously detailed representation. They would serve as a starting point for a player's creativity, and set the stage for the story they would embark on with their characters.

Our Style Inspiration

A theater analogy carried through our guiding principles of composition and visual density: We would take the approach of building a minimal stage set for each location, as if creating the scenery for a play with a distinct foreground, middle ground, and background.

Our core sources of reference for our art style were the prolific works of Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle. They were a perfect fit because of their expressive tactile mark making, bold abstraction, and use of color to convey emotion to the viewer. Harrison studied their bodies of work extensively and together we established some of the key elements we would adopt.

Framing foreground elements are something Mary Blair used expertly in her art. She would often have organic elements leading the eye into the scene, nestling the main focus in the middle ground. This created a sense of voyeuristic intimacy—viewers could observe the scene from a distance, and the foreground elements gave permission to peer in from a safe space. They also added general visual beauty and helped keep the eye circling back into the composition. From a product standpoint, these would also make excellent elements to use for social features and posts. This allowed cohesive theming that brings immense brand value beyond the individual asset.

Tactile mark making was another core visual pillar of Harrison’s established branding for Hidden Door, and the location art illustrations are the most beautiful embodiments of this. Using a variety of Procreate brushes, Harrison evokes that visceral feeling of expressive, confident brush strokes associated with physical paint. In an age where products are oversaturated with overly polished, meticulously detailed, hollow art (which my favorite illustration professor would call “artistic taxidermy,”) we wanted something that was distinctly human. These tactile paintings are energetic, with a sense of immediacy that feels like a call to adventure.

The Idea-to-Art Pipeline

Harrison’s process was a tried-and-true classic pipeline that he ran with efficiency and speed. First, we’d determine specific needs the design or narrative required, focusing on how to bolster the feelings our player would be experiencing. For example, if we were developing art for a canon location from an existing beloved intellectual property, we’d look at the variety of nostalgic touchstones a person may hold: past book descriptions, illustrations, film sets. Our goal was always to create immediate recognition, so pulling from these established tropes was essential. After gathering references from the time period, including architecture as well as regional and cultural influences, we’d identify which ones felt the most compelling.

Harrison would first produce a series of pen or pencil thumbnails. These helped us ignore distractions like color and texture and lock in the most dynamic shapes for the composition. After selecting one, or having a set of revision to combine the strongest aspects of several, color roughs would begin.

The color roughs really set the atmosphere. Changing the color alone could completely shift the feeling the player might experience when seeing the imagery.

After that, it was time to paint. One of the hardest challenges was not overworking the asset. Too much precious detail could leave the impression stiff and subdued. Harrison is a master at finding the perfect balance—enough detail to provide the presence of a finished work, without sacrificing the work’s infectious, vibrant energy. If anything got too tight or precious, we’d often look back to the color roughs to find inspiration.

Each playable world or story chapter introduces new, unique challenges. We met those challenges with a sense of curiosity and collaboration, very similar to the approach used for character design (as detailed here by Aurora Vear). Harrison’s painting prowess is what brought so much life to the gorgeous locations you see above.