Work02 / The Banana Cartel

The Banana Cartel

Character design, illustration & generative art

A full visual world for a 5,555-piece generative art collection: logo, mascot, more than 325 hand-drawn traits, story art, website and animation.

Year
2021
Role
Solo designer, illustrator & coder
Tools
Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, After Effects, Lightroom, VS Code
Services
Music & culture, 3D & motion, Branding
The Banana Cartel, Character design, illustration & generative art cover
5,555unique characters generated
325+hand-drawn traits
20one-of-one rares
The Banana Cartel, Character design, illustration & generative art 1

The brief

A team reached out on Twitter to build an NFT project around generative art: 5,555 unique characters made from hand-drawn traits, with a community focused on exclusive drops and promoting other artists. They needed a logo, the main monkey character, a website, marketing graphics, Discord emojis, storyline animations, roadmap graphics and Twitter assets. All I had to start with was the story and the fact that they loved Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The challenge

I had never worked in NFTs or generative art. I took it on anyway, researched how these collections are built, and learned enough code in VS Code to generate the collection myself, on top of the illustration and animation.

Research

I studied a lot of projects and artists to understand how "traits" work in a generative collection. HashLips' tutorials on generating NFTs in VS Code gave me the technical path. Then it was time to sketch the mascot.

Process

I started with a mock logo so they could begin marketing. Their story pointed to monkeys, bananas, a mutated banana and a treehouse, and I knew the character's face would eventually take over the logo.

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For now, the mutated banana became the mark, since it was central to the story and could live on as its own asset. The team loved it.

Sketches

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Then the monkey. I went through many sketches and variations before landing on the final character, then tested fur colors that would later become fur traits.

Logo update

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With the mascot done, I updated the logo. I drew a front view (the generative art uses a three-quarter view), plus back and side angles in case we needed a turnaround. The front-view head replaced the mutated banana, and I brought the banana back as crossbones. A second version used half bananas with crossbones at the ends. The team kept both.

Storyline & roadmap graphics

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Next came four storyline illustrations to introduce the project's world, drawn in Procreate and finished in Photoshop and Illustrator, and a roadmap graphic showing the community what was coming.

Discord emojis

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With enough assets to launch the community, I made a set of emojis from the monkey in different hats and outfits, animated in After Effects with the Rubber Hose plugin.

Traits

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The longest part of the job: more than 325 hand-drawn traits across fur, mouths, eyes, tops, masks and backgrounds. Every trait was drawn in Procreate, aligned in Photoshop and exported as its own layer.

I ran them through HashLips' art engine in VS Code and rewrote part of the layering and export script to control rarity, so some traits show up often and others almost never. About 20 one-of-one traits sit outside the generator as the rarest pieces. Below are some of the 5,555 characters it produced.

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Website

A simple site built from a template they liked, covering the project, the team, the roadmap, teasers and a mint section for launch.

Social media graphics

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Animation

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