I love supporting awesome people with Design Karma. ComicTom is one of those people. A couple years ago, I re-stoked my love for comics and graphic novels and earlier this year I found Tom's Youtube Channel ComicTom101 and started binging his content. The GeekStreet 101 team does all sorts of videos like Weekly Top Tens, True Firsts, and other general comic topics. Walking into a comic book store can be intimidating and it's really hard to know where to start. Between my Comic Book store Rocket Comics and ComicTom101's content, I was able to confidently pick out what series I wanted to read and what books to invest in.
One of the main thing's they do is a Mystery Comic Box. They call their's the Mystery Mail Call and they had a website explaining what they do and allowed you to buy the monthly box. I'm a subscriber and really enjoy getting the box every month. They really do a great job of giving you some awesome value and expanding your collection. They also do this sweet thing called Comic Karma (that's where I got the idea to name this adventure Design Karma). Members of their Youtube Community, Instagram Community, and Comic Community in general send in rare and valuable comics and they randomly put them in the mystery box. Some of these comics have had values upwards of $3500!
Because I support them and think the ComicTom101 brand was going to benefit from a refresh and a new website, I contacted Tom and asked if he wanted a Free Website.
Getting Started
Ok, like always I run through a quick 3 question "Getting Started" list to see what this brand needs.
Do they have a logo- Yes
Do they use constant brand colors- no
Does the branding stretch across all their material (web, digital, social, paper)- No
With that in mind, I knew I had to unify the branding and bring them some consistency so when they used the logo, it felt the same.
Branding is one of the most important assets you can develop. Having a consistent brand helps fortify your buyers confidence in your product and make their buying decision easier.
Branding
Tom gave me full reign to change the logo or do what ever I wanted with it but I really like where it was. They had a very clean black a white almost stamp style of Tom's hair and glasses and if you've ever consumed their content, you can recognize it right away. I just cleaned the logo up in illustrator so we had a vector asset and started playing with font styles to add to page titles, shirts, pretty much anything to make this brand stand out. I landed on BangBang by Typogama for their typography. This had just enough comic book feel but still had a really punch esthetic that made their brand stick out. I got the license through my Envato Elements account and you can learn more about that on my Life Hacks page. I chose red as their main accent color because it is a high energy color that matched their videos energy. Then I started playing around with using the icon logo with the new text standard and found that having it peak out from behind flowed really well. Specifically because these were meant to be on hero headers on the website and on horizontal print.
Design Project 01
Another Project I worked on with Tom was designing a custom mailer for the Mystery Mail Call. All of the timing was crazy. I emailed him asking if he needed a new site when he was thinking about investing in one and they had started this project and were at the point where they needed to send a design. Tom gave me the template file from the printer and let me come up with something sweet for him. I just got my box in the mail and it looks so cool! I really like the angled texture and the consistency of branding through out. This is definitely a project I'm proud to talk about.
The Wrap Up
This project was great. I got to flex my branding skills by bringing everything awesome about ComicTom101 and the GeekStreet101 team into one image through out a whole website, social media, and branded material. These guys are awesome and if you want to start collecting comics by spending like a dollar a day, sign up for their Mystery Mail Call and check out their Youtube Channel to learn about anything in the comic community!