Rounding out the 12 main teams, I knew I had to include the White Walkers. Question was… where do they reside? I scoured over the Wiki of Ice and Fire and debated the idea, nearly scrapping it altogether. I was going with Always Winter but was swayed by a good friend to use Frostfangs.
This was the one design where I really broke convention like the Night’s Watch Raiders. I wanted to keep to a city and house name but having only seen the two seasons and not read any of the books, I was a bit lost in the Haunted Forest.
I finally settled on Frostfangs White Walkers. I’ll admit the name didn’t roll off the tongue but thought if I could pull it off, it would be well received. I’ll leave the judgment to you all.
In coming up with the design, I wanted to do something different with the colors. I already had a lot of silvers, grays, blacks, to go along with whites. I knew that white was going to be a central color but had to offset the color somehow. Grey was inevitable but what about another color. The Rangers’ crow had those red eyes. That was it… that frozen blue look in the eyes of the Others. That was third color. I tried to make it look like one of those arctic blue cough drops.
Next was the hard part… the actual look of the design. I did some searching and figured I needed something that looked like a soldier, pretty much a dead soldier, though. I figured something akin to a Civil War style look. It seems rather strange, but think of the leader of the Others as an old civil war soldier or mountain man. That led me to a college team in West Virginia, the Appalachian Mountaineers.
Its design was exactly where I was going in terms of ideas. It had that ghostly man with a beard set against a mountain. However, I knew that I needed to be more cracked and rigid with the lines as the leader of the Others had that very wrinkled and lined face. So, I redrew the design, using the Mountaineers as a basis, but made the face hatless, more angular, added in some lines to the beard, and then expanded the mountains more to adapt to a hatless, nearly bald head.
As I’ve found out over time, fonts for logos are rarely created, taking into account all the letters. In this case, no one font worked totally for all the letters in Frostfangs White Walkers, so I had to customize a few to capture the same feel as the Mountaineers logo. The easiest part, considering the rest of the design, was the side wall of the team name. In the Mountaineers logo, the "N" and "S" have breaks in the gray. I decided to go solid, unlike the "S" in Tullys because it just looked better.
When all was said and done I was proud of the work... it's still not 100% where I would have liked it, but I'm not going back and putting walkie talkies in over top of the guns.
And with that, here's The Frostfangs White Walkers.
The Frostfangs White Walkers
Navy Anvil Unisex T-Shirt from Skreened: $25.99
iPhone 4S/4 Deflector Case from Redbubble: $37.20
As always, you can check out the entire line of designs at my Redbubble and Skreened stores.
Footnote: Here's the original inspiration for the design. I've began putting this at the end because when I post it to Facebook, it tends to pull the first picture which is usually an actual sports team logo... ruining the effect of sharing the post.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
