before you continue, press play and turn up the volume so we’re in the same headspace 🧠
so the first illustration i made was just a product of me trying to recreate the 2016 cover of “‘boys don’t cry” magazine cover featuring a photoshoot of frank ocean, one of my favorite musicians, which actually ended up being the alternate album artwork for blond.
before then, i knew i wanted to drop a new nft collection on quixotic since i had just started working at optimism. i have definitely learned a lot about creating in the nft space these past couple of years, and wanted to treat whatever it was i was about to build differently than the previous project i worked on. i was going to make art, give it away for free, and focus on visual expression.
so i started drawing a few more designs + crafted a mood for how the project should feel-- the vibe is the only thing that really matters. nostalgia is my favorite feeling, and when people look at the art i create, it is the feeling i want to convey. over the next couple of months, the artistic concepts for motorheadz stemmed from a combination of my environment + the result of me googling “cool motorcycle helmet“ at 3am before dropping my phone on my face.
as i was slowly creating the images, i began brainstorming ideas for what the website should be. i’ve recently started to develop a passion for building experimental websites and carry the perspective that a webpage is a new medium-- an interactive digital canvas.
videogames have been a huge lifelong interest of mine (i’ve got a goal to illustrate a videogame of my own one day). this daydream combined with the nostalgic undertone motorheadz already carried resulted in the early development of a jvmi original:
can’t play a videogame without a console, and the nod to a gameboy in this design reflects my introduction to videogames as a kid. the crisp lofi startup sound aims to transport you into the shoes of a kid in the 90’s that pulled a gameboy out of their backpack after school.
i implemented the website in typescript using react + recoil, and the whole thing is styled using custom css. the animations are mostly done with the framer motion framework + some basic css animations. you can check out the code for it here, feel free to fork it and implement your own version of a gameboy site. it pretty much functions like a normal gameboy, except the colorway can be dynamically changed by clicking on the bottom left “select“ button.
...and that’s pretty much it for now. time will tell what the future of the collection will be, but for now it’s just a dope world of helmet-wearing, deeply saturated pixel headz livin’ in my rendition of my cousin’s old gameboy i got as a kid ❤️🔥✌🏽