The Art & Science of High Fidelity NFT Design
A creative walk-though of Moonbeams first native bluechip NFT art collection with creative co-founders — with Sanju, Nil & Luke
For those of you who missed our recent AMA with Mad Cripto last week — we have put together a creative deep dive with our creative co-founders.
This post will go into the complex Exiled Racers (EXR) design elements and the detailed thought process behind moulding —Moonbeams first native bluechip NFT art collection — Exiled Racers.
Let’s kick it off with the background and creative narrative design.
1. Creative Experience & Background
“We’re always pushing hard and exploring the unchartered — we naturally having incredibly high standards from the work we’ve done in the past with massive global brands — its a blessing and a curse.” — meet Luke, Nil & Sanju from estudi-image our co-founders at EXR.
Established in 2019, estudi-image is a New York based contemporary design studio specializing in high-impact images and videos that are alluring and expressive. With a fixation on craft, an elevated perspective and a tenacious ambition to push boundaries, estudi-image creates sophisticated content that disrupts the space with its distinct and skilled aesthetic.
Independent from client-driven projects, estudi-image creates experimental work that expels the established limitations of 3D and demonstrates the potential of the medium as a whole. Estudi has now created and designed for some of the worlds largest brands, Apple, Nike, Adidas etc.
And yes these are our co-founders — absolute creative elites with powerful storytelling abilities — key to the development of the EXR brand long term.
2. Developing the EXR brand and graphic language
Story telling is never just one element eg. whats written or told — a much larger portion of it— is the visuals that tie into the narrative — this is why we spent and incredible amount of time thinking through how we bring the EXR story to life visually in different ways.
While developing the graphic language we took to 90s rave posters and more modern graphic design inspirations. Blending these two feelings we found created a nostalgic but crisp and updated visual language that made EXR what it is today. Something that we are calling “retro-futurism”. We found inspiration from all over — and pieced together what we believe is something truly unique in the space.
2. Injecting deeper in world story telling with Sponsors & Brands
Part of figuring out ways to make the EXR universe feel real was to create a host of interesting but “fictional brands.” The thought behind this is that we believe whether on earth right now, or across the galaxy much later — brands will always be a massive part of any world that exists — past, present and future.
We took this concept even further and found a place for these brands to come to life as sticker sponsors which we will start to see. Similar to F1 and Nascar brand sponsors, unique Pilots and Racecrafts will have brand sponsorship stickers based on their faction and backstory.
This also helped establish the look and feel of our graphic language throughout the universe. The companies are made up of mercenary supplies, rebel groups, Racecraft upgrades, bio-hacking companies and military factions. All with their unique backstory and preferred faction.
THE MAKING OF MOONBEAM’S FIRST NATIVE BLUECHIP NFT COLLECTION
At this stage, it’s well established that anyone can make a 20K NFT collection — thats never been hard — especially replicated 2D or pixel art works which most are at this stage.
Whats challenging — is making truly high quality 3D NFTs with intricate design systems that have never been seen before — and allow us to create “no-floor-model” designs, more on that below .
1. Pilots
When we first started thinking through the different NFT design elements of the game — we decided we would do as much as possible creatively to make each one of these NFTs desirable— regardless of rarity. We spent several months thinking through and developing concepts that allowed for us to achieve this. In the end we landed on the concept of having multiple factions and eventually ranks — each of them with unique backstories and design features.
It was important for us, not only to create incredible artworks but also to add richness to their universe by adding further creative elements such as the fictional brand sponsors — and writing about their stories(Augs, Mercs & Serfs). At the same time we discovered that the output we were getting from our procedural system for factions was flexible enough to add additional unique creative layers such as Ranks.
By splitting up the three factions in 5 ranks (1 still unrevealed)it enabled our generative system to have 15 unique outputs with each of those outputs creating very unique results. So in theory we have what we call a “no-floor model” generative system where there does not look to be a “base” model and instead each unique result looks equally as dope.
2. Boosters
As for the boosters, a way for us to attack it we decided to split them in half. 5 Boosters for the Racecrafts and 5 for the Pilots. Each of the unique boosters we could then attribute to their Racecraft or pilot. After that we started on the exercise of what exactly the Boosters would —well,boost.
This will be revealed in the game but each Booster increase specific attribute of either the Racecraft or Pilot and it is visually inspired by that attribute. Example: you can see the “Engine Tuning” creates a boost for “Acceleration” and the design was inspired by the acceleration attribute.
3. Racecrafts
Inspired by the designs we created for Pilots first — we were able to translate our design language into the equivalent the Racecrafts. Organic shapes for the Augments ships, triangular sharp silhouettes for Mercs and utilitarian language for Serfs. Not only are the shapes and overall design inspired by their Pilot counterparts but the color palettes for each the ships and pilots factions match each other.
Summary
Creating high fidelity NFT projects that are truly unique and stand out in a very noisy space is challenging — but we believe that because we have spent a tremendous amount of time, effort and thought on the NFT development planning that allows for incredible design flexibility and creative layering — we have ultimately made it possible.
Thank you for joining our TedTalk.
Sanju, Nil, Luke
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