A little while back my friend Plushie offered to pass her old vape box over to me cause I'd been experimenting with vaping CBD to help manage my anxiety. The box's design has the same vibe as an old 80s VCR, which inspired me to design some mods for it.

In case you're not familiar with Betamax (or just Beta), these are designs parodying the logo of a video tape cassette format from back in the day. An earlier design also featured three coloured stripes down the stem of the logographic; which I found very convenient to inject a bit more personal flair by replacing the RGB colours with those of the trans and bungender flags. The idea was to get these printed out in sticker form to attach to the device as branding of the fake retro tech company to complete the look and really make it my own.

Once I'd made the designs back in September and after a lot of deliberation and even more avoidant procrastination, my favourite sticker company had a sale on, so I finally got them ordered in!

I don't yet have the vape that they were intended for, but I've recently gotten over the fear of applying stickers to my belongings so I figured it was a great time to do some more of that. My first target for these very on-brand designs was obvious, and it had to be my laptop.

The only issue was that I was dealing with an extra challenge this time around:

Sticker Alignment.

With these stickers being square-cut, having them applied even slightly off-axis to something I would be looking at for most of my time would have driven me insane. Needless to say, applying them was a bit of a process... and an ordeal.

You can watch a quick little video I took of peeling the sticker off its backing here, if you're into that sort of thing.

I neglected to take a photo of the application process for the sticker on the wrist rest, but it was far more straightforward and you can probably figure out how that went based off of the others.

Unfortunately, the one on the lid took a few tries to apply properly, and the indentation of the existing logo proved to be somewhat of an impossible obstacle when trying to avoid it causing imperfections in the final result. If and when I replace it, I'll try a different technique to fill in the space which will hopefully leave it looking perfectly flush.

Much as I'd like to, I don't think I'll be able to sell these given the hassle of setting up and maintaining a distribution system for an online store. That said, I might be able to add them to my Spreadshirt store as plain white vinyl stickers (no metallic options, sadly!) and maybe even some apparel designs if there's any interest for them.

For a while now I've wanted to revamp my themed, "branded" promotional artwork, and I was inspired while watching a stream vod where the streamer had their desktop on full display with a really cozy vibe to it.

That, combined with my love for things retro and synthwave led me to design a new template based on lots of old things instead. I plan on using this for a few different things, but I figured I'd put it through its paces by remaking my commission pricelists since they're overdue for an update.

Here's two of a set of four. I'm really quite pleased with how they turned out! While it's a little bit chaotic for the amount of information presented, I think it still makes for a nice balance where it's nice to look at, but still quite easy to understand what's being conveyed.

After my first attempt at creating this turned into something completely different, I decided to take a second shot at it using an online version of MSPaint that I'd found. It seemed well suited for the project, and I'd already had some experience using it in the past so I felt up to the challenge.

Especially in contrast to Reach, this felt really affirming to create; just a simple, light-hearted little celebration of my fursonas and what they mean to me, without much pomp and circumstance.

Someone I follow on Twitter shared a very 90s image (contains mild female nudity) taken from a CD archive called "Gifs Galore" as what I assume was a half joking challenge for artists to draw their characters in a similar way. It seemed like a good idea at the time, suitable for some Ruby artwork, and since I've been struggling to make something for myself for a long time now I thought I'd take things a little easier by directly referencing it. This was a fun bit of practice to get some of the rust off, and I hope you like it.