Monkey & peach Kickstarter Campaign
Westbound Comics | Campaign Manager, Illustrator, Video Editor, Logo, Motion & Graphic Designer | 2019
Monkey & Peach was the first Kickstarter campaign that I had the pleasure of managing. From the first meeting with co-creators David Chun & Hammond Liang (Hammling), I was excited to be a part of the project. Working alongside the duo, I created not only the design and layout for the campaign page, but also helped in structuring the time frame for deliverables and reward fulfillment, which required speaking with a multitude of vendors who were able to produce the items we needed within a budget that was very volatile. The campaign was a complete success and the team delivered all rewards on time to backers.
Campaign Video
Creating the video for this project came around a perfect storm of bad timing. The only available time I had to work on it was while I was over on the West Coast. This meant that instead of my beefy desktop computer, I was working off of my underpowered laptop. Ultimately, it would come down to utilizing minimal render-heavy effects, and so, simple motion design was used. Coupled with the roughs for each page (the comic wasn't complete at the launch of the campaign), the video exuded an overall underdog quality which backers found to be endearing.
Logo Designs
The masthead logo design for the comic book was based off of an initial sketch by series co-creator Hammling. I worked off his rough concept to create the final logo which utilizes the raw brushstrokes of sumi-e (Japanese calligraphy) for Monkey and the craved jade-like typography for Peach. Between the two are traditional Japanese stamps featuring the kanji for Monkey and Peach.
For the team's self-publishing label "Westbound", I created a simple wordmark with a visual element that harkens back to the roots of the stories -- bringing Eastern tales to a Western audience. The stem of the T turns into Sun Wukong's tail wielding his Ruyi Jingu Bang (magical staff) in the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West.
Lettering
To speed up production and reduce costs, I took on the role of letterer for Issue 1 (and Issue 2). This required learning a lot of about how comic book lettering should be and how to properly stylize onomatopoeias. I also helped transform Hammling's concept artwork into lore pages to showcase the world of Monkey & Peach in better detail.
Campaign Rewards
For issue 1's rewards, I designed unique Kamon (Japanese Family Crests) pins for each of the 5 groups in the world of Monkey & Peach. These were simple gold and black enamel pins to let the traditional designs of the crests take center stage. We also create 3 large format poster prints, a set of 4 character stickers, and 3 different t-shirts. The Oni t-shirt was illustrated entirely by me.
