Krupa's Blog: Designing the RKG Video T-Shirt (Patreon)

Krupa’s Blog: Designing the RKG Video T-Shirt

Hey everyone, I wanted to give a little insight into how we cooked up the latest design: RKG Video.

Its origin actually goes back to late last year when we were busy figuring out what RKG would look like and how we wanted to pitch the whole thing to the world. That included picking a name and coming up with a logo.

We went through tonnes of names, and nothing felt quite right. Every name we came up with felt like it might date or we’d outgrow it. We knew the channel would be the three of us, so we settled on RKG – it’s us, but also, over time, it’s loose enough to cover anything we might want to do. It’s specifically abstract (I think that makes sense). We also knew we were going to be making videos.

VHS cassette reference.

There was something there. The collision of a three letter acronym and video strongly evoked one thing – VHS. I grew up taping films and programmes off the TV, and have so much affection for those blank, reusable cassettes made by TDK and JVC. RKG sounds like it could’ve been another one of those brands. That was the starting point.

Some of these cases seem now surprisingly modern – clean typography, vibrant colours, sharp lines. It’s something we wanted to subtly evoke in the look of RKG. So with the help of our trusted designer, Ryan Quintal, we went through a bunch of fonts and colour palettes before settling on the one we launched with back in January. Retro yet modern, nostalgic but forward-looking – it’s exactly what we wanted.

Very early RKG designs.

RKG colour palette choices.

For me it evokes the joy of taping something off the TV – liking something so much you want to preserve it, put it on a shelf, and be able to rewatch it at any moment. We don’t really have a mission statement or anything as formal as that, but if we make videos that lead to that feeling, I’d be happy with that.

So taking that idea one step further when it came to designing the second T-shirt, we thought it’d be fun to imagine what it’d be like if RKG and Retry existed 30 years ago. (Incidentally, we decided years ago to debut new episodes on Saturday mornings because we wanted them to feel like Saturday morning cartoons for grown-ups.) So what if RKG was a brand of VHS, not a YouTube channel?

Early draft of an RKG cassette box.

Early draft of the RKG cassette.

And on the back, well – we wanted to smuggle in a bunch of references. The stack of cassettes represents some of the moments that have got us to this point. Things that we talk about often and if it was 1994, we’d probably have taped them and stuck them on a shelf.

Here was the first draft of the VHS stack, which are composed using the RKG colours.

First draft of the VHS stack.

But we wanted to smuggle in more allusions into the tapes themselves and needed to decide on what went on the tapes. Finally we landed on…

Final draft of the VHS stack.

If you’d like to pick one up, RKG Video is available from Everpress until midnight on Friday, September 20th (BST). 

Krupa x