Vector Illustration - Affinity Designer

The good Sleuth of the CrikeyCon team trusted me with bringing Droppy back to the big top for another year. Like the work I did for CrikeyCon VIII, I made the key art and designs for various collateral for the event such from stickers, posters, website graphics, shirt designs and more.

CrikeyCon is a one-day volunteer-led cyber security convention held in Queensland, Brisbane. It's a day packed full of things to check out, including talks, workshops, capture the flag challenges and overall good vibes. You can check out all the talks recorded on the day over on CrikeyCon's YouTube channel.

Return of the Drop Bear

The brief for this year was to continue with the theming of CrikeyCon VIII, I fortunately had flexibility to deviate from the design to create something distinct from last time. To continue the theme, I rolled with the idea of a Droppy-led cyber invasion from the circus with Terminator elements.

I learned a lot from the workflow from last year, especially getting comfortable with Affinity Designer. I wanted to try a different workflow here to incorporate traditional mediums in the development process, mainly because I stare at a screen for most of my waking hours. The key idea was to encourage playing with shapes and nailing design challenges before jumping into Affinity Designer. This was a fun approach but had it's drawbacks, especially when it comes to using references.

Sketch to Affinity

Once I had a concept I was happy with, I started to create a vector in Affinity Designer. There was a good amount of time put into the initial line work as my sketch didn't have everything 'figured out'. The background and addition of the Flipper Zero was made in hindsight, deviating from the traditional workflow.

I wanted to create a colour palette that distinguishes itself from VIII and would work well in print.

While I'm pretty happy with how it came out, my biggest mistake was not enabling 'scale to object' in Affinity Designer. This option will rescale line stroke values proportionately with the design as it's resized. This mistake was most obvious in print.

Convention Day

Despite moving interstate a week after the convention day, CrikeyCon IX was another great success. I definitely recommend getting involved and volunteering on the day if you're ever interested in checking it out.

Pictures from the 'Evolution of an Espionage' display which showcased various cold-war era espionage tech.

Pictures from the dedicated lockpicking room and car hacking display. It's hard to see from the pictures but the CAN bus of the Porsche was hooked up to an interface to demonstrate how to mess with CAN traffic. Check out 2Puck's write up on how he made the demo possible.

Thanks again to the CrikeyCon crew for trusting me to bring Droppy back under the big top!