Notes on the design process.

Say Milady is a banner NFT collection of Japanese dolls, sweet shop Russian supercomputers, semi-vintage magazine covers, and Pixelady friends – who say, Milady.

We began with the idea of a typographical project for banners. We thought, what could we add to that to make it more interesting and unsurprisingly, came up with, Milady. In the sense of a greeting. The initial thought had been gm because one of us had the domain rare gm – but we wanted something more fun and with a tighter brief. The idea of milady being a greeting, a response – was becoming more apparent in the ether. Yoo to miladyresponder for going hard all over the tl. Love miladyresponder. But where did miladyresponder go!

i’d started collecting Remilios and had zoomed right in and marvelled at the fine pixel bitmap detailing. As well as pixeladies – both a reminder of the pace and fractal beauty of pixels. Initially we’d been playing with backgrounds similar to Milady and with a drive full of our own photos we tried those out – one morning cutting a hundred original background images. We’ve saved these for later although a couple make cameo appearances in to this first release.

With a hundred backgrounds ready to go – within hours the link to milady sonora’s are.na appeared and we got distracted falling down the mj rabbithole.

We mixed source images with prompts including japanese doll, magical, sherbert, alice in wonderland and cinderella. There was no obvious rhyme or reason to the prompts apart from going with the first thing that came to mind and letting it happen.

These reminded me of the Girl magazine photo comic drama strips. Especially as mj added in extra frames to accommodate the 6:2 aspect ratio.

The next set we asked mj for vintage walkmen crossed with this source image:

We have a sherbert theme. Pink and green like apples and blossoms.

After the walkman effort we set our sights on Soviet era control rooms and supercomputers.

Sherbert stayed in the prompt and sweet shop supercomputers were born.

along with secret pachinko parlours on the ginza. again this was a name that decided upon itself. along with the rest of the channelled naming system. it was fun to later discover a milady artist with pachinko in her name :)

With a consuming interest in Pixelady Maker accessories they became the say milady daemons – just a few of our faves. Especially the pink ones.

onwards through the art direction from the are.na – japanese magazine covers

the right hand text, or modus operandi, is based on a pixeladymaker overlay Digital Love

one morning we had a splendid burst of super good images from the ai including giant pink hello kitty supercomputer from a russian control room. Also look out for nuclear kitty.

With the ai having a good run as so often happens first thing of the day this doll produced some beautiful images –

This doll formed some really cute pieces with her knitted jumper – love the knitted jumper – together with matching starry skies.

This is my fave doll made during the entire process and signalled we were ready to shippe our smol project – and onwards to the next stage of building the minting site and figuring out how the smart contract stuff all worked.

and rendering out the art.

both will be written up in following posts.

Here are some of the dolls pre-art which we used for a test mint of Artemis dolls.