How to create 10K+ unique characters?
As the Creative and Design Director for the LinksDAO NFT PFP project, I led a team of remote artists in creating and launching a series of 10,050 unique, iconic golf-themed NFTs.
This project, aimed at revolutionizing the traditional golf club experience, involved extensive collaboration with artists from Argentina, New Zealand and Portland Oregon.
By blending innovative design with cutting-edge blockchain technology, we successfully brought to market a collection that garnered significant attention and engagement on OpenSea, with 3.3K unique owners.
My role encompassed overseeing the artistic vision, ensuring cohesive visual storytelling, and driving the project's creative direction from concept to execution, resulting in a celebrated and widely recognized NFT project.
OpenSea - buy one!
Mood board
I created a mood board to align the client’s brief and my creative POV. I was aiming to set a tone that was youthful, energized, colorful and iconic.
1st rough - Nicholas Weigel
PFP
After 6 rounds of exploration, learning and refinement. We landed on a design that is sexually amorphous and very flexible to decorate, while keeping the design crisp, clean and reducible like a logo or postage stamp. In essence, the prevailing criteria for a successful PFP design.
DESIGN >
We knew we wanted strong counter lines and a range personality while finding the perfect “trading-card” pose and a unique style.
PROCESS >
We created 100’s of drawings for this project.
!hatTke! collaborated with a team of Individual artists and designers from 3 countries.
We leaned in heavy with Bueno and the ability to iterate in almost realtime was very powerful and a lot of fun.
We started with a lot of inspirational reference.
Honed our reference points and got alignment from the Links team.
Then there was a blast of character exploration until we chiseled our design into 1 hero silhouette.
The next challenge was to make the silhouette convincing for a cast of male, female, and gender ambiguous characters.
The ask was 10,050 unique characters - no repeats. Bueno made this possible.
It became a game of math, testing many options and building some massive photo shop files to keep track of all our layers.
Links was a great client and as !haTke! we were inspired to make a PFP of our own (coming Soon)
A Larger Story…
Links wanted to expand their reach by creating a backstory for the launch. We created a series of style frame panels they could use in various media and tell a story of a magical storm that brought the Links Champion statues to life.
It was a fun project, great client and intersting area for me to stretch my creative.
