Astrogaming Podcast Branding

Mid 2019 · Sole Designer

Overview

The GameSpace is a nebulous, mostly unexplored region of space far, far away, where the intrepid researchers of the Astrogaming Podcast explore and catalog the games they find floating in the void. Featuring Nick Blackley, Jacob Smith, Mitchell Smith, and Joubin Izadi, the Astrogaming Podcast follows these extremely brave astronauts as they delve into the nitty-gritty details of the games they find and play every other week. If your ears crave a sci-fi flavored video game analysis podcast with a little improv spice, then Astrogaming needs to be on top of your podcast feed.

Goals

The Astrogaming podcast needed branding for social media and, most importantly, podcast cover art. The goals for the Astrogaming branding were to be:
· Adaptable across all social media accounts
· Fun and sci-fi themed
· Visually clear on what the podcast is about

Process of building the logo from start to finish.

Solution

The branding ended up with 2 parts:
· The Astrogaming Wordmark
· The spaceship illustration
A bold, high-contrast wordmark combined with an eye-catching and visually-interesting illustration made for flexible branding that satisfied my goals.

Building the Wordmark

The wordmark is based on the font Mobley Sans and was altered to be less clunky and more flavorful. The font exhibits a sci-fi flair, but I wanted to pump that up with some modifications. At this point in the process, the blog and book, Typeset in the Future by Dave Addey was extremely helpful in finding references and best practices for sci-fi style display fonts and wordmarks.

The final two wordmarks.

Part 1: Wordmark

Initially, I created just a single-line wordmark for Astrogaming. However, the wordmark was not legible when shrunk to fit on a small podcast cover. To get around this I produced a second two-line wordmark that was narrower and did not have to be scaled down as much. This improved legibility on the podcast cover, and gives the option of wordmark depending on the medium and format of the asset. The wide wordmark is great for wider assets like banners while the narrower two-line wordmark is better for less extreme aspect-ratios like square images.

Part 2: Illustration

In fiction, the “Big Unit” is our trusty spaceship that we use to explore the GameSpace. It is an actual narrative item but the image of it helps establish the tone and topic of the podcast. The ship is based on a Nintendo 64 controller and is heavily inspired by Eric Geusz’s illustrations along with video game concept art. I drew the illustration in Procreate then vectorized and refined it in Illustrator.

Examples of inspiration images for the illustration style from Eric Geusz and Starcraft

Final vectorized illustration of the in-fiction spaceship the "Big Unit"

Sketches & Controller Spaceships

Initially, I tried to use a Nintendo Gamecube controller as the base of the spaceship, but it felt awkward in execution. After a few attempts with the Gamecube, I switched to the N64 controller which worked well since it naturally looks like a spaceship. I converted all the buttons on the controller to ports and other doodads so that anyone familiar with the controller can tell exactly what it is.

The podcast cover—a combination of the wordmark, illustration, and a clarifying tagline

Podcast Cover

With the wordmark and illustration done, the podcast cover came next. I combined the two elements with a tagline to make it clear what “Astrogaming” is about. I also outlined the cover to give the cover a boundary against darker backgrounds and to occupy some awkward negative space.

Colors

The primary colors are a dark blue and a high contrast orange. The blue is to establish the sci-fi genre while the orange is to bring a little playfulness to the design. The high contrast between the colors also makes the design stand out on a podcast feed.

Some WIP versions of the podcast cover