After watching this class, I started brainstorming for badge design ideas. I am a big fan of all things pop culture, so the things I came up with were:

— the 13 books in A Series of Unfortunate Events

— Coen Brothers movies

— Wes Anderson movies

— Buzzfeed Unsolved quotes

The last option seemed like the path of least resistance, because I wasn't constrained by any set number of badges (whereas in all the other prompts I would have to illustrate a set number of books or films).

I made a list of the most memorable quotes from the show:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 1 - student project And then I tried to see how some of them would look as badges:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 2 - student project I decided to start with the two easiest ones, that had a lot of text and an obvious and fitting illustration choice for them:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 3 - student project

(the very initial version, which I didn't save, had no shading, but the shading definitely made things, uh, more appealing. You'll just have to trust me on that).

As I started to add more and more badges to the set, I was forced to confront my choice of colors, because there were too many and they weren't meshing together all that well.

I googled some badge designs for reference and I settled on this one as inspiration:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 4 - student project

The things I liked about it:

— subdued colors

— warm / cold color combos

— the variety of badge shapes

I recolored the badges to make them look more consistent:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 5 - student project

The "rock'n'roll" badge was initially the same purple as my first go at the "crabs" badge, but I decided to forgo purple altogether. I decided to have these color combos for the badges: yellow/orange, blue-grey/orange, blue-grey/pink.

This is the final result:

Buzzfeed Unsolved Badges - image 6 - student project

You will notice that there are two outliers: the "Alcatraz happy hour" is an asymmetrical design, and the ghost badge has a unique shape and a light blue border color. The latter is totally intentional. because it's the central badge in the set. As for the Alcatraz one, I tried to figure out whether I could make it more symmetrical, but that made the design overloaded, so I left it as is.

Anyway, thank you for the class! I'm probably going to continue my foray into badge design sometime soon.

Maria Ku

illustrator, hopeless wanderer

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