research and design
Know the target user. After a series of conversations centered around the bride-to-be's personal favorites and habits, I suggested a clever approach would be to create a pickle-themed (her favorite food) scratch-off lottery ticket (her favorite guilty pleasure).
Scope limitations. Designing a fake lottery ticket is hard for a reason. I bought a few of her favorite scratchers and examined them closely: assembling content and layout would take time but were wtihin reason; printing the final product into a convincing ticket was another story... I checked with a local printer to see if and how I could truly reproduce something similar. Unfortunately, the lottery system prefers to keep forgeries to a minimum, so truly replicating a ticket would be almost impossible (and possibly illegal). I decided to mix in my fake with several real tickets of varying sizes to artificially increase its perceived authenticity.
Assemble assets and execute. Fonts, icons, verbiage, fine-print, bar codes, signatures, watermarks... there's a lot going on on a lottery ticket that you wouldn't normally consider (especially when you lose). Having a real template helped a lot, but compiling useful assets and laying them out still required several iterations. here's the initial design:
solve for unique challenges
Apparently, scratching things causes damage. Real tickets are a custom, light-weight, matte stock with a high-gloss section only where the scratch paint is applied. the gloss allows the paint to scratch away easier while preserving the underlying content. The scratch paint is a proprietary formula that is sprayed on in a way I couldn't truly replicate. Some googling confirmed that silver acrylic paint would suffice as an alternative, even moreso when diluted with other colors to minimize its metallic sheen. But the thin, matte stock I chose to closely replicate a real ticket, as well as anything printed on it, was destroyed when I painted over it and then scratched. I tried replicating only the gloss portion with packing tape, clear stickers, and contact paper... each of which had their own problems that mostly boiled down to the scratch area being visibly raised in a way that was overtly bogus. In the end, I reprinted on a one-sided, semi-gloss stock that would provide enough protection for scratching but still hold paint in a realistic way.
Printing on paint is decidedly difficult, but not impossible. With a card that would now hold paint you could scratch, there was still the glaring issue of a blank, scratch area that was otherwise image-laden on any other ticket. Through several attempts, I confirmed that carefully feeding the ticket through an inkjet printer (laser was obviously not an option, which I also confirmed) and letting the result airday yielded a sufficiently believable result. at this point, time was of the essence and perfect was the enemy of good. Here's the final product:
reflections and happily ever after
This project was a total success with respect to the intended outcome: she said yes (but probably not just because of the ticket).
I still feel there was room for improvement in the quality of the ticket and scratch surface by layering clear and reflective spray paints onto the original matte stock that was a closer match to an actual ticket. Of course, this method would have taken a lot more time, resources, and ventilated space to properly incorporate aerosols into my toolkit. All things considered, i'm pleased with the outcome and happy to have been able to contribute something meaningful to the process. And, yes, I was the best man at the wedding.