Star Wars artist Colie Wertz has a vision for the future of laptop design

It was not too long ago that most gambling laptops were bulky, garish desktop replacements full of flashy RGB nonsense. The first Razer Steel, free in 2011, was almost seven pounds and IT was considered glossy for the time.

The net few years have seen many an popular laptops converging on similar design trends. Bezels are shrinking, screens are growing, and chassis are getting thinner and lighter. But a couple of tech product categories have seen such a radical translation as gaming laptops in the other few years. The introduction of Nvidia's Max-Q platform in 2017 allowed gaming laptops to run AAA titles in thinner form factors than we'd e'er seen ahead — and AMD's Ryzen 4000 series has upped the ante even to a greater extent. With shrinking human body have come more soft esthetics.

For some, that's a good affair; IT makes laptops Thomas More versatile and more acceptable to act work, school, and productivity devices. But what about folks who want portable machines, but still want to show the world that they're exploitation a gaming laptop?

Asus had one root with the light-prepared AniMe dot matrix that adorns the lid of some Zephyrus G14 models. MSI has another: the GE66 Raider Dragonshield Edition, a 5.25-pound 15.6-inch gaming rig designed aside artist Colie Wertz. Wertz thinks that as laptops trend toward subtler variety factors, designs equivalent his can help gambling enthusiasts continue to assert their identities.

A model spaceship on top of a drawn diagram, with a silver pen next to it. — *Look at the area with a shield — that's the laptop.*

By day, Wertz is a concept artist and modeller for film, TV, and games. He's worked on all but every recent space-adjacent matter you might think about — Star Wars, Transformers, Bumblebee, The Mandalorian, Dune, and more. He's non a laptop designer by deal out, but he savage into the job after meeting a group of MSI designers at Computex 2018 and walking them through his creative process. He doesn't just draw a spaceship, a machine, operating theatre any else piece of machinery helium's designing, he told the team. He develops its history; atomic number 2 whole shebang its backstory into every point. The engineers didn't see why a similar approach couldn't be applied to a gaming laptop, and they invited Wertz to project one.

So Wertz came up with the Dragonshield. "I proposed that we give the laptop a backstory," says Wertz in an consultation with The Verge. "What I cause in my daily job is I give things backstories and root them in either reality or a world we buns buy into. That's how the Dragonshield idea came to be."

The Dragonshield, in Wertz's brain, is a panel that has dead slay a spaceship and landed on Earth. "IT's not an old, beat-up starship," he clarifies. It's "identical sublimate — there's no dirt painted into the rouge." Wertz began by sketching out the ship along a Post-It note. He obviously couldn't turn that into a real ship, but he old the next best thing — a 3D model — to make IT tone really.

His original lid design had MSI's logo (a shield with a dragon thereon) in the center, as information technology is on the company's other laptops. But A he continuing working on the spaceship, Wertz decided that a massive, partial shield along the side of the lid would make the laptop look more like a real panel — it would better fit out the story.

Wertz was surprised that MSI was connected board. "You don't change the Nike swoosh, you don't change the shape of the logo," Wertz says. "MSI flexed on this, and that was one of those things I did not think they'd flex on."

The bright orange hue was another deviation; you don't see orange laptops day-to-day. "I like orange and IT's a popular business-design color. IT rather says 'This is a prototype,'" Wertz says. "And then I showed the orange one ... totally expecting these guys to go 'Nope, we take it to be red,' and then they said 'Zero, we like the orange tree.'"

The Dragonshield isn't the only adventurous color quality MSI has successful in recent months — the company released a hot-pink model of its Prestige 14 in February, and its upcoming Modern furrow comes in a grasp of pearlescent shades.

Passim the design action, Wertz was thinking of his audience. Laptops are such commonplace products, He believes, that there's no reason they shouldn't reflect your ad hominem style in the way that clothing and accessories can. "The computer is such a valuable part, an inescapable start of all our lives now," atomic number 2 says. Manufacturers, helium thinks, should "ply to their lifestyle, versus their computing needs."

In the case of gambling enthusiasts, that buns signify a bold lid. "I knew that it was going to be higher-conclusion gaming," Wertz says. "Our engineering science has gotten to a point where our internals are small, we tooshie cool them plenty. And we'll lul be able to aver on the exterior 'This is a gaming laptop.'"

"If you've ever been around gamers or creatives, they have a go at it to throw the latest, greatest little toy," he adds. "And this is a moderate-version toy." The Dragonshield can ship with a pattern of its spaceship of origin as well, in addition to a matching mouse and mousepad.

Eastern Samoa I noted in my review of the GE66 Spoiler Dragonshield Edition, nobody needs it. Simply masses own lots of things they don't need, and the ultimate purpose of a gambling laptop computer (for most people) is fun. That's Wertz's destination American Samoa an creative person: to make things fun. "Wherefore can't you give somebody comparable that something extra, a little backstory or something to undertaking their personality with?" he says. "We'ray going to show you how to answer what you want to manage with a little more of a smile on your face."