Hello again to my readers! You may have noticed that it’s been over a month since I’ve published. I’ve been working on a pretty incredible bit, which I hope to write about soon enough.
But first I’d like to share with you a fun little project I started two years ago that I was never really sure what to do with. Let’s see if something new comes out of it.
What do you do when it feels like social media cannot fully capture the complexity of your identity? Flashback to summer 2019: I’ve been thinking about identity and computers and social media.
I remember back when I played Little League Baseball and sometimes we would get custom team baseball cards. So I go over to the Topps website, and they still have a page where you can make your own baseball cards.
I mess around, try different frames, different team logos.
“Huh, I could really do a lot with this.”
Two pieces of design advice flashed into my memory:
One, from a professor: “The best designers steal.”
And two, from a graphic designer I used to work with when I asked her “This is incredible! How did you make it?”
“It’s just shapes!”
Brilliant! The card frame. It’s just shapes! Lots of rectangles. A circle. A triangle. I can whip up one of these in Sketch (which costs money, so try Figma instead if you want to experiment with design).
So now I’ve got a frame. But what do I put into it?
I look through my old photos on Google Photos and pick out some that seem remotely interesting, ones that I could give a name and assign a different identity, maybe build a story around it.
Here they are… Set 1, or the “Pilot Episode”, so to speak.
THE RHYTHMIST
THE TRICKSTER
These aren’t just digital assets! I looked up a “print your own custom playing cards” website and ordered a whole deck. I picked out this nice black and white tree design you see on the left. I think it looks quite magical.
Also, I had membership to a MakerSpace at the time, where I used a laser cutter to carve up some old cardboard into little tokens with the symbols on them. Boom. I haven’t used them for much, but there’s some potential there.
Fun Fact: each of the symbols in the top left corner are Webdings characters.
What do the identities mean? Stay tuned and find out.
How do they all fit together? To be honest, there was not really much rhyme or reason to the names I selected. If you’re looking for an “all-encompassing” mythology like King, Warrior, Magician, Lover then you should look elsewhere. But I have found some interesting connections and it has helped me with my personal storytelling.
How have I used them? I’ve been experimenting lately and I’ve found a few possibilities (what is a HyperSigil?). They’re almost like a personal Tarot Deck.
And if you want to help me start a Digital Artist Collective where we somehow make money selling our own playing cards as NFTs, then you should hit me up with your ideas.
STAY TUNED