2024 PDGA Membership Disc

After John Dorn and I’s seemingly successful 2023 Membership campaign for the PDGA; Vic Allen (PDGA Membership Manager) reached out last year to see if John and I would be interested in doing the memberships this coming up year. What’s exciting is that they would be landing a new Eclipse R2 Plastic mold from Axiom Discs, the Insanity. The goal this year was to provide 3 triple foil stamps commemorating the Membership, Birdie Club, and Ace Club with a 4th design that would intend to be the Eagle Club disc update.

I loved what John and I did for our first collaboration in 2023. Having the opportunity to think about that drop and what we could do next to improve upon it was a consistent theme. With the larger Eclipse rim on a black R2 distance driver; we both were feeling that a cyberpunk/ futuristic-TRON subject matter could work. We would intentionally show the entire team on the Membership disc but feature the different characters on the Birdie and Ace Club to help round out the connection between all of them.

2024 PDGA Membership
With the approval of the concept greenlit, John and I got started on reference sharing. Because of how intense MVP Disc Sports’ Eclipse plastic compares to the rest of the industry; we wanted to lead with that. TRON Uprising, vintage TRON, and some weird Jodorowskys’ Dune samples made it into the mix. While John was settling into more of the classic TRON arena sphere, my concepts more or less went to this more open-air space obstacle. Grinding out how we’d include all of these characters took quite a bit of work. From the final thumbnail concept, you can see we mixed a bit of classic into the sort of upper thirds concept my original blue/yellow sketch provided. This year was also the introduction to the PDGA’s new branding. So we were able to get early access to the logos so they could make their way onto the new membership stamps.

Rough Phase
The basis of this layout goes back to the first sketch I did in the thumbnail stage. We all like that each character would have a unique silhouette, and be back facing to save us time and allow the other discs to feature the character in their environment. Going from rough shapes to the final characters took more time than we expected. How would the heavy, large-winged brute character on the left come to fruition? We wanted each character to have their uniqueness and specialty. We realized we wouldn’t have room for both male and female protagonists so we reduced the middle figure and made sure it was represented elsewhere. I took one more shot at the composition after we felt like the classic felt too close to TRON. I had John take over the rough stage and push this stamp to completion.

Final Stage
Since there wasn’t any great way of showing the idea of a smaller fairy-like female scout on the right side of the stamp, John had a great solution of taking her off the shoulder and designating a female reconnaissance bot for Ace Club. The dragonfly drone would represent the Birdie Club, and the heavy on the left side rounds out the supporting cast as the Eagle Club. It freed up a lot of foreground issues we were having. In the end, I felt John and I did a good job of creating a sci-fi subject with our twist.

2019 Jomez Pro

Another one of these awesome moments where an opportunity fell in my lap to assist an MVP/ JOMEZ Pro partnership for an order. Jomez is a film production company pushing out top notch disc golf footage. There wasn’t any preconceived ideas they wanted to run. The slate was clean and I quickly got to work. One thing I really dug about Jomez’s look from the year previous was the style in which they used for their video intro’s. It’s very similar to a style I’ve admired for years that combines 2D animation with live action film. You’ll see it in Who’s Framing Roger Rabbit, Gorillaz, A-Ha “Take On Me” music video, and many others. If you want to geek out, Here’s a great video explaining it in the first 6 minutes.

We expanded a bit on the explosion coming from the Jomez Pro logo similar to their introduction sequence. Jomez wanted to see what the next step of that design would look like. While we loved the idea of it, i felt like their logo was taking a smaller role in the stamp didn’t feel right. The other idea both parties really honed in on was the Follow Flight shot tracking stamp idea. Follow Flight is essentially Jomez’s most featured post production trick that they use. It allows viewers to view a replay with the flight of the disc highlighted in the shot. The biggest thing is it created more space for a much larger logo.

It was back and forth within MVP’s design team on whether halftone should be included. Everyone was on board for a lightened load of main black foil. The design without it allows the whole stamp to breath a bit more. To have a stamp work on a variety of plastic properties is highly important when they’re wanting a large order. In the end, Jomez was stoked and we were proud to get their support. Let me know if you dig this design! Were there thumbnails that you would’ve liked to see expanded more? Leave a comment and share this blog. Thanks for tuning in!

You can buy the stamp here from Jomez directly!
https://www.jomezpro.com/shop/?orderby=date