Logos I designed for my boomer shooter TTRPG, GUTGUN. The idea here was to create an organic typographic logo that carried some of the "edgy" vibes of boomer shooter video games like DOOM, Quake, or DUSK. The idea to make the text dangle like guts came pretty quick, but it took some iteration to land on an arrangement that felt chaotic, yet balanced. You can get GUTGUN and the free SDK on my store, or itch.
For the SDK's logo, I kept in line with the now established type styling, but wanted to figure something that would make the "SDK" portion feel clearly secondary to "GUTGUN". Making the text plain black against the red background drew too much to it, but I found that inverting the color by adding a thick border maintained its legibility, while also making it clear that this was part of a larger project.
TTRPG culture has a heavy emphasis on sharing and iterating on what came before, so it's quite common for designers to get ahead of the curve and provide attribution assets for folk who use their systems as foundations for their own games. This can also serve as a clear signal that you're OK with folk spinning off your game design! These system logos typically appear early in the attribution pages of books, so they don't need to worry about being small. So, I made more text in line with GUTGUN's "font", and wrapped it in the blood drop found in the original logo.
While designing a new website for GUTGUN, I realized I finally, actually, needed a favicon. Originally, GUTGUN was only a TTRPG, so there was no need for such a thing! A logomark was not part of the original branding. I iterated for a while on iconographic designs, but eventually landed on the simple answer: wrap the G from the original logo in the blood drop, as I did with the FoG logo. After so long, I think GUTGUN's identity was strongly tied to the type, so a logomark would have to include it.
Personal piece. I wanted to experiment with my art style and see what I could remove while retaining my voice. I've got a hand disability, so I've long had a tug of war between the growing complexity of my art style and my physical limitations. The big thing here was seeing if I could cut out color-based shading entirely, and focus only on hatching to give form and depth to my subjects. I also experimented with something I've wanted to try for a while, which is integrating "geometry" into my work. Straight lines, clear circles, triangles— typically mechanical shapes, despite working with very organic subjects.
After building off the same codebase for years, I'd grown enough, and shifted my priorities enough, that my personal site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Before, it was just a portfolio. Now? It's a central hub for all of my work, more personal. To help reflect this change, I wanted to make the site more unique, more friendly, more me. The alternating rounded rectangles on the homepage are a callback to a few older art pieces of mine, particularly The Organ Fades as All Things Appear. The small "window" previews were done to still allow the flavor of preview images, without taking up as much space as the full-sized ones did on my old homepage— all while making them actually visible on mobile. Accessibility was another key component of this redesign, as I'd learned a lot about the WCAG in the intervening years. Contrast is stronger, there's alt text on every image, and I made more mindful use of HTML structure. Usability is important to me, so I spent a lot of time on the gallery/portfolio page design in particular. I didn't want to have separate pages for every medium I work in, as it's more work for users to navigate. A single page with filters, though? That's simple. Clean. Convenient.
EVERY LOG A MEMORY is a solo journaling game about a cabin you built, and the memories within. The game was made in memory of my late great grandfather, and the illustration is of the cabin he built in the New Mexico wilderness. I pushed myself on the layout, to make the homage more "proper". The first page takes the form of a log cabin, by framing the introduction in a triangular shape, placing cut log graphics alongside the play instructions, and making the table rows resemble logs viewed from the side. You can get the game for free in my store, on itch, or simply download the images below.
Logo done as part of my entries for The Corporate Catalogue, a collection of dubious corporations for use in your sci-fi TTRPG campaigns. Each of these logos was paired with a full dossier on their respective corporations! You can buy The Corporate Catalogue here. I wrote Mounte as an ethically dubious logistics corporation, and it was a fun challenge to design a logo for a very stuffy industry like logistics while still giving it a sci-fi edge! Given the name, I already knew I wanted the logo to be a mountain of some form, the question was how. Ultimately, I landed on this triangle-focused design. I felt that utilizing a foundational shape was only fitting for a foundational industry! This was paired with a stuffy-yet-bold sans serif font (Now) in bold and light weights. The red/white/blue colors were chosen based on real-world logistic company branding, many of which utilize those three colors.
Banner for EPISODE 3 of my boomer shooter TTRPG, GUTGUN. EPISODE 3 takes place in an alien world, particularly featuring an eldritch cathedral. I wanted to make the architecture feel truly alien, yet still feel recognizably like a cathedral of some sort. You can get GUTGUN and the free SDK on my store, or itch.
Website and home of my APRA: Anomalous Parks & Recreation Areas project, part of a wider brand refresh. You can visit the site here, where you can read more about the project. A key aspect of this new site and brand refresh was legibility. The original APRA site was made earlier in my webdev journey, and had some of those novice "wowie look at all the cool things I can do!" design choices, rather than restraint, which lead to some aspects feeling disjointed and messy. Simpler colors. No more literal photo assets. Thicker borders, bolder text. The new site still retains a lot of the original's identity, especially in the primary design appearing like US national park signage. But it's enhanced with background art that fits that minimalist style, rather than disparate, overdetailed work. Even the background colors match the site's varied palettes, now! The new site was built using StaticWiki, a tool that takes markdown files and converts them into HTML within a fully offline, searchable wiki format. While this forms the structural backend, the CSS and much of the HTML is my own. My reasoning here was that I wanted something that would make writing new articles (and converting old ones) easier than working in raw HTML. I also use it for personal reference, when working on APRA projects, so being able to browse the wiki offline via my local files is extremely convenient, too!
Graphic poster done for Trans Day of Visibility, to experiment with style, and to vent.
Commissioned redesign of logos I did a few years ago for Vazdimet, a sci-fi narrative setting. You can read more about it here. My client wanted me to redesign the previous logo— which I'd done years ago and grown much since designing— to line up with a larger brand refresh the project was undergoing. Vazdimet is a sci-fi fantasy setting for a book series, involving a lot of space travel and magic. The original logo had a much more minimalist design of the "launching ship" concept seen here, where the ship was simply a triangle. I was asked to redesign the logo to bring out more of the setting's fantasy elements, and make the ship more clearly a ship. So, I added extra detail— but not too much— to draw out the ship profile, while slipping in a "sparkle" into its exhaust trail, to allude to the fantasy elements. The portion beneath the text was also redesigned to resemble an open book, viewed sideways, to allude to the project's existence as novels. The text is untouched from the original design, which is simply a set of slight edits to an extant font.
Select ENEMY designs I did for my boomer shooter TTRPG, GUTGUN. I tried to make sure each felt distinct, and fit their in-game mechanics, while utilizing GUTGUN's limited color palette. You can get GUTGUN and the free SDK on my store, or itch. First, the FORGOTTEN SON, which is a SECRET BOSS players can encounter. The encounter is a hectic fight to kill the FORGOTTEN SON before it powers itself up by eating other ENEMIES within the arena. With this in mind, I wanted to visually reflect its eating mechanic by giving it a large mouth and hungry expression.
Next, the MAW. The MAW was one of the more difficult ENEMIES to pin down a design for. In the game, the MAW increases the DMG of ENEMY attacks that pass through it. I wanted it to make sense for the variety of attacks that exist in the game, so a lot of my early concepts were scrapped due to lacking sensible ways for this to work. Many of those were crab-like, with large openings in the creature's head. In the end, I figured a floating design with a wide mouth (or MAW!) was the best fit.
The PRIEST fits in line with the other GUTTER cultists, who share uniforms. This was done both because it fits in-world, AND saved me some time. However, the choice to have the cultists share uniforms also meant I'd need to make each of them distinct from one another through body shape, props, and posing. After her are the INITIATE and DISCIPLE, to show how I achieved this.
The SKIN is weak. It has some of the lowest HP and DMG values in the game, it's meant to be something the player can squash with ease. But it's a deceptive ENEMY, as it doesn't return the player's health when killed. Slowly, surely, if the player isn't careful— they can be killed by the SKIN. I wanted their design to reflect their weakness but retain an edge of a thread. So they're an emaciated, hollow figure that appear as if a gust of wind could crumble. But, this hollowness includes the face. I believe that a blank or hollow face like this is something most people will find unnerving, even if it's just to a small degree. The empty face is exactly what I needed to give them that subtle menace.
A single page TTRPG, I designed the layout to utilize US political iconography, with the core choice box made to resemble a ballot sheet. You can get the game for free in my store, on itch, or simply download the images below.
A fictional sponsor's logo for my APRA: Anomalous Parks & Recreation Areas project, part of a wider brand refresh. You can visit the site here, to read more about the project. Infinidogs, in APRA, is an interdimensional food truck company that sells hot dogs from various realities. Infinite realities, infinite hot dogs. Infinidogs. Combine common iconography for both, and you get an infinity symbol hot dog. While the concept came quick enough, it did take some iteration to land on a design that was legible, and friendly.
GUN designs for my boomer shooter TTRPG, GUTGUN. I tried to make sure each felt distinct, and fit their in-game mechanics. Each had to connect to the player's intestines, and utilized GUTGUN's limited palette. It was fun to figure ways to make bone, guts, and flesh into recognizable gun archetypes— and a few unique ones. You can get GUTGUN and the free SDK on my store, or itch.
Site background for my APRA: Anomalous Parks & Recreation Areas project, part of a wider brand refresh. You can visit the site here, to read more about the project. The original site's background was a normal forest, with highly detailed vector trees, which I felt poorly reflected APRA's vibe. I wanted the new background to better fit the retro aesthetic of APRA, while alluding to its aloof, supernatural nature. Of course, this still had to fit as a background without taking attention from the actual site content! I decided to go with something more minimalist, and thought that depicting an impossible forest fit very well with the setting. It's a little disorienting, but so is APRA itself.
Layout for a free zine, meant to be easily printed and assembled at home. I focused on accessibility, here, and not too much flair. The goal was primarily to make the information within quick and easy to understand, while also keeping the page count low so that it'd be easy to print and assemble. You can get the zine for free in my store, or on itch.
Commissioned rifle design and diagram for Vazdimet, a sci-fi narrative setting. You can read more about it here. The numbers are not paired with text, here, as the client wanted to write those herself. I was given a detailed brief on the purpose of the rifle within the client's novels, and a painting another artist had done that depicted the same rifle but with less detail. My client wanted something more accurate to the novel, but also with greater consideration for mechanics, so that she could write about its engineering in more detail for her readers. With further discussion, we agreed to start from scratch so that the new gun design could make mechanical sense and better fit within the setting. I worked with my client to determine how, exactly, she'd like the gun to work— and once she was happy with our explanation, I moved forward to designing. This rifle is primarily meant for riot suppression, utilizing a form of magical electricity that can be stored in batteries (found at the base of the grip). However, it can be switched into lethal mode via the switch on its side. I took care to make sure the barrel opening for these two modes had room, with a grounding rod to focus the energy. Below the stock, and under the grip, I also drew notches for shoulder strap attachments.
I make a set of holiday letters every year, to send to friends and family. Each time, I aim to make a different type of font. I think this year focused more on the background than the letters themselves, though. I was trying my hand at a style I've seen around music spaces a lot lately.
FREE WILL takes place within my larger APRA: Anomalous Parks and Recreation Areas project, so I wanted to design something that both fit the wider APRA branding while remaining distinct on its own for those unfamiliar. To achieve this, FREE WILL uses the same texturing that other APRA assets do, and sticks in a pseudo 60s-70s style, while shifting the palette toward warm hues and utilizing a different (yet not dissimilar) font. I also decided to play with space a bit, by placing the logo sideways along the edge of the page— rather than simply on top— to give me more space for the stretching visual, and to make the layout stand out a little. You can get the game for free in my store, on itch, or simply download the images below.
I was hired to design a logo for SKYLD, a horror noir TTRPG played with playing cards and poker chips. My client gave me a detailed brief going over the game's inspirations, the setting, and a moodboard of reference images they wanted me to keep in mind. They wanted both a logomark and logotype. For the logomark, I designed something that played with poker iconography, while also alluding to the game's horror angle (hence the eye i nthe center). My client felt that this read too much like it'd be a gambling game, and requested further iterations. After some back and forth, I landed on this design with arrows on the sides, which represent the shifting reality of the game's setting. The logotype was more straightforward, I designed a typewriter-esque serif font, with cuts in the wide ends to give it some extra flavor. With both elements settled, I set about manually adding bumps and ridges to the whole design to make it appear like ink messily bleeding into paper. My client requested a number of color variants, I've only included two here in the interest of saving space.
A personal piece. With this, I pushed myself to put more into the background, going as far as challenging myself to do said background in perspective. I also worked on using line weight to push the composition, by having thicker lines on the focal points, and thinner lines for smaller details.
Icon set for the buttons on this site's homepage! I really wanted to make sure that these felt like they fit together, and utilized the circular framing properly So, I went for a negative space focused design, where each icon was "cut" out of their frames. I also decided to have each stretch edge to edge, with a shared width, for cohesion.
Logo and layout for SUMMER/CAMP. I wanted to evoke the feeling of an old VHS sleeve, and 80s slasher movies. This influenced font choice, palette, texturing, and even the layout itself, which was inspired by the way the back sides of VHS sleeves were designed. Even the small aside boxes were inspired by ratings boxes! You can get the game for free in my store, on itch, or simply download the images below.
A redesigned logo for my APRA: Anomalous Parks & Recreation Areas project, part of a wider brand refresh. This was made alongside a new website here, where you can read more about the project. APRA's original logotype was heavily inspired by 1950s-70s tourist postcards, and APRA's brand identity as a whole maintains some of that retro aesthetic. When it came time to redo the typography from scratch, I wanted to maintain a little bit of that inspiration, while pushing for something unique. Simple, bold glyphs with round edges, small counters that line up horizontally, and tall "hats" all helped with this. The biggest challenge here was making sure that the empty space between the P and R didn't dominate the logo's composition, and thus ruin the balance. I spent a lot of time playing with shapes that could achieve balance here, and landed on this design where the P and R both share the same semi-circle bottom. I also made the glyphs more squat to help reduce the empty space, but made sure there was still enough for the glyphs to read clearly. I went through many iterations on the logomark, especially given that APRA's original logo was purely typographic. I was building a proper website for it this time, and needed something that'd work for the favicon— as well as future projects. I really liked the idea of something that played with negative space, and could be read 2 different ways. A big theme of APRA is duality, between the banal and anomalous. So, the final logomark can be read as either a watchful eye, or as a classical UFO. It was the big chunk of white towards the top that actually inspired me to go back to the type and extend the tops of the glyphs, which not only made them match the logomark better, but also really gave them the last bit of unique flavor I was hoping to achieve. Finally, to top it all off, I paired the logo with Lexend Deca for the subtitle. This is the primary header font of APRA's branding, so it was only natural as a fit.
A set of sword design commissions. The top 3 I made myself, to advertise the commmission slot. I tried to hit a breadth of styles with those initial 3, with a fantasy flavored lotus inspired sword, a sci-fi cleaver, and a more 'standard' sort of fantasy sword. The remaining 9 were commissions with various briefs. In order; a sword for a "magical girl", a spin on a glaive mixed with an 1800s cavalry sword, a cat sword, a sword that'd be found in a dragon's hoard (hence the obol/coin motif), a "tacky UFO sword you'd find in a gift shop", a dual-scissor-action sword, a one handed sword with a handguard, a subtley snake themed sword, and finally a magical electric jian still in its scabbard.
Designs for my ongoing In Case of 'Moji (ICoM) emoji set. A big part of this project is practicing and honing my ability to work within a "brand", in a sense. I wanted everything to feel like they belonged together, rather than just being solid designs on their own. The ICoM set has a set of rules, regarding color, line thickness, eye presentation, and a few other elements.
Single page layout where I really tried to push myself into working outside my comfort zone. This is the 2nd version of ONESIX, where I added a second "page" of extra tables. Originally, the game was the top half as a horizontal layout. You can get ONESIX HYPERFIX for free on my store, or itch.
A logo I designed for my Umqwam writing project. Umqwam is a fantasy western world populated by bird people, so I wanted to dip into western genre iconography while communicating the bird aspect. The icon takes inspiration from sherif badges, while also utilizing negative space to form a feather at its top. The custom typography is a mix of "classical" western fonts, with modern bold sans serif fonts. I wanted it to be highly legible, while still clearly reading as "western". The framing around the whole thing is inspired by 1800s engravings.
A personal piece. I wanted to work out my character design muscles, and decided that going off a single-word prompt would be a fun challenge for doing so. The word here was "melon". I was also experimenting with shading techniques, and made a triangle "edge" brush to give both texture and a slight gradient to the shadows here.
Abstract piece, practicing color and composition.
A few samples of layout I did for GUTGUN. I wanted to strike a balance between something minimalist while still maintaining impact. Legibility was also very important to me, hence the large text. Like GUTGUN's art, the layout stuck to a limited palette, as well. You can get GUTGUN and the free SDK on my store, or itch.
A logo I designed for a local trans support group. The goal was to create a design that was recognizable, could easily fit pride colors, and bore some local flavor. Given that the group's in a logging town in the PNW, I went with a stylized pine tree.
A personal piece. I wanted to focus on pushing my composition with this one, utilizing leading lines, value, and hue in order to do so. I also experimented with smooth, painted shading, rather than my usual hard edged cel shading.
Every Christmas, I design a set of literal letters to send to friend and family. It's a great opportunity to challenge myself, to try something new. This year, I tried my hand at Bauhaus style. I read up on the movement's history, hallmarks, and gathered reference, before getting to work. I got the idea to play with "building blocks", in a sense. Bauhaus places emphasis on function, so this felt appropriate. Each letter is built in a 2x2 grid of rectangles, using a set of shapes and textures. It was a fun challenge, for some letters!
Character sheet design for Operation Thingamajig. In line with the rest of the book, I wanted to make the sheet appear like part of a larger clandestine dossier. The opposite side, not shown here, is simply blank space to record equipment. You can get the game in my store, or on itch.
I was hired by River Horse Games to style and lay out a website on World Anvil for their Dark Crystal Adventure Game. You can visit the website here. This project provided me with some fun challenges. River Horse asked that I make the site fit with the actual book's styling, including fonts, colors, and assets. However, the provided assets were created for print— not web, so things like the leather texture used on the book's cover or the filigrees found on the bottom of pages didn't tile or scale for web use. So, I had to adjust the assets to suit this new usecase. Textures were cut and made tileable. The filigrees were originally raster images, so I had to trace them as vector images in order to ensure their responsiveness on mobile.