This design was the most difficult because it was SO outrageous. I needed to make something grotesque but not ugly, evil but hilarious, classical but gabber... It looked completely different to start off with. I began by hand-drawing a few horrible metallic looking insignias, hoping to simply put them together on a black background and that be enough....
...it was definitely not enough! Even after bitmapping the images to make them seem more cyber-crazy, they were still not evil enough. I had the idea to 3D model a “Zen Satan”, but, in fact, I don’t think such a character was ever meant to be visualised. Instead, I downloaded a robot and thought about how best to manipulate him to freak people out.
I ended up editing the robot a LOT! here’s what he looked like orignally:
...actually quite cute! Naturally, it’s all the more grotesque to start with this cute robot and turn him into the creature above! Once I had an idea in my head, this design progressed much more easily and I ended up using some photoshop filters I’d never used before, like Bloat and Pinch. To make the text, I put one of the pixelate filters on, duplicated it loads of times and dragged it all over the place.
finally, I didn’t want to say goodbye to the cheeky devil face I’d drawn before, so I turned him into the Zen Satan logo. The person who had sent me this description said that the logo looked out of place. This was actually something I was aware of when putting it there. I had taken inspiration from a lot of gabber and noise rock record sleeves (they’re all in the pinterest board.) These records have a lot of little confusing design quirks which I was trying to replicate. I wanted it to look a bit ugly and very confusing.
