I decided I needed to stretch my creative muscles a bit and maybe try diving into another “larger” personal project that involved some slightly more involved work than my usual one-offs that I could include in my portfolio. So the idea here was to come up with some branding and a small product lineup (In this case three tees) for an imaginary clothing company. This made sense to me because I like playing games, and I like making tees, so it was fueled by both of those things, making it pretty fun to do.
The “9999” (read: Nintey-nine ninety-nine) concept comes from a recurring value in older JRPGs, where 99, 999, 9999 are commonly the maximum values for things like player damage, health, level, mp, etc. More specifically in the case of games by Square/Square-Enix. So from that idea the whole inspiration of the brand here is based in the nostalgia of JRPGs rather than general gaming as a whole.
So with most of that in mind, I kicked things off with some logo doodles and rolled into some rough ideas for tees. I hadn’t really settled on the name when I started, as you can see, but I wanted the logo to lean more towards type than an image, although I’m not the best with type. Basically what I originally doodled was awful and it all got scrapped pretty quickly. I was much more excited to do the tee design work at that point, so I kinda bounced between them when I got bored of doing one or the other.
Things picked up on the logo end once I abandoned what I had and started over on a fresh document. After playing with it for a bit I settled on a font, tweeked it a little bit and had something I liked in the two 9’s overlapping two more 9’s on top. With the addition of the simplified crest shield behind it, I was ready to call it finished. I had originally intended for it to just be in black and white, but I was pretty happy to see how well it works with colors. For fun, I created a business card to test out the final product.
With all that done, I made a handful of shirt designs to go with the theme and mocked them up using some of Threadless’ shirt templates. I actually ended up redoing the second one because I was curious how it would look with thinner linework, but ended up liking the original better. Speaking of that, Frenden’s brush presets are amazing, by the way.
So, I’m calling it done. Mission accomplished and all that good stuff. 2013 is the year of pushing myself and diving deeper into this whole art/design thing. I’ve already wasted a lot of time this year in a rut, hunting for a job in the ‘biz (and failing). I figure it’s time to put my downtime to better use and whip the portfolio into shape. Looks like I may be back to school and working on the bachelor’s in the fall if no other/better opportunities present themselves so until then It’s about making myself a better candidate and oh my god I just wrote an essay.
