Creating a “thing”

I’ve been asked many times about my Nomenloonyverse so even though I’ve told this story in a little detail before, I thought I’d go full out and tell you the whole deal.

The year is 1985. I get my first computer. We’d had an Atari before then, and my friends had computers, but we didn’t have money. My family wasn’t well off, so I learned to be patient.

It was a second hand Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K bought off a neighbour. It had started as a 16K and had been upgraded prior to me getting it.

I’d played on my friend Darren’s spectrum and I’d seen him playing a game called Jet Set Willy. It fascinated me. The whole room naming thing, the slightly creepy feel of it all. I saved up and saved up – not having any sweets or buying anything for about 4 weeks and I managed to buy myself a copy of the game.

I was hooked! I followed in Darren’s footsteps and attempted to map the whole mansion.

We both got stuck at the same two rooms – The Forgotten Abbey in the cellar, and Nomen Luni on the roof – however – after a few weeks I figured out the timing for both (in the case of the former I put blue felt tip dots on my screen to mark the turnaround point) and I proudly told Darren I’d made it onto the roof, even describing it as being a bit like the classic arcade game “Hunchback” up there.

He didn’t believe me and he said jokingly “you’re a Nomen Loony”, until I showed him how I did it, and I showed him the rooms I’d sketched out.

…and it pretty much stuck through my teenage years. I was “Loons”.

Many years later when I was looking for a name to use on Instagram I thought it was time to drag out my old name and use it, and in using my old name I had to create a persona to accompany it. Now being a huge latex fetishist, and having ordered a rather gorgeous petrol blue suit, it hadn’t failed to escape me that the colour highlights created on that suit by the specular lights in the photo studio where I had the “rubber suit & balloons” shoot done were incredible.

So I decided to create my logo based on those colour points – and with a slightly retro/cyber/dark future look to it.

My chosen platform was Cool text where I created a cool downloadable logo using one of the slightly less readable fonts on there (at first I tried to use the font from the movie Xanadu but it just looked like I should be rollerskating everywhere). I think with Generation Nth I hit the bar perfectly.

Cool text couldn’t do my colours though, so I just loaded the image into a photo editor and did a few colour shifts, thus creating a fairly close replica of my suit colouring in my logo.

I didn’t make huge areas in the actual colour of the suit as the logo ended up too dark, but I did use most of the highlight colours on the suit within it, and if you compare with the photo above I’m sure you’ll agree it’s pretty close.

So now I’m twitching and creating multiple images a week using all my stock iconography, and I’ve developed a workflow to do these quickly and easily (using a free app of all things!)

The photos are just taken against my white wall, and I think I’m getting some of the poses right…

Onwards and upwards then – and if you’re not following me on Twitch then I’d appreciate you taking a look – I keep 60 days video on there, but everything is simultaneously cast to YouTube and a few days after the stream I unlock it over there for permanent archive purposes.

www.twitch.tv/nomenloony