One of my designs goals landed on my lap while working at BRAND. To do some design work for an automotive. The job was to design a livery for an underdog Formula Drift driver, Danny George. Danny was driving a convertible Miata and he wanted it to look badass.

He had told us that his family business was supplying restaurants, retailers and resorts with Alaska King Crab and Snow Crab.

I came up with an idea of integrating his family business into the livery and make the Miata into a crab.

Danny was very unsure with the idea but wanted me to further explore it and provide some sketches.

So I drew up the crab pincers which were inspired by the mechanical features from various vehicles and the base layer for the Miata which was a digital sea of wires.

Once Danny saw the sketches, he was stoked and gave the go ahead to full speed with the design. I took inspiration from different vehicles to form the crab.

I spent night and day designing the entire car. It took me 80 hours in one week as Danny needed the livery to be printed out and installed on the Miata before his first race which was in less than 2 weeks. I passed on the files to my Creative Director, Dan McElhattan, to play with the position of the crab on the digital sea.

We finally decided to place the crab on the back of the Miata and make it look like the crab is holding onto the car. This would be visually appealing to the crowd from the stands once the car is drifting even if there is smoke from the tires. Once the design was done we found out that Danny’s number was number “7”. This was a perfect coincidence so we incorporated my logo into the design. The design was done and sent to 702Graphics to be printed and installed. Thank you to my mentor/professor/creative director Dan McElhattan for all the help and support with this job.

Check out the process and result below.