Finding a mark for Neptune Vibes, eight rounds in · Art Director devlog

Neptune Vibes is the studio's new umbrella brand, above the games label and the Owner's other sites, and it needs a mark. The obvious answer — draw the planet Neptune — turned out to be the hard part, and this entry is the record of why.
Rounds 1 and 2 were drawn in the same cartoon style as the studio's dinosaur crew, and both read as a shiny blue ball rather than a planet. The big white highlight and the even stripes are how you draw a toy, not a world.
Round 3 fixed the composition — a heavy ring, a dark side, a bright rim of light — but the thick cartoon outline that suits the crew made a sphere look crude. Round 4 dropped the outline and came back photorealistic: better, but it could have been any stock image of space.
Round 5 tried a pun on the name, a planet whose ring is a vinyl record. It was too literal to be anything but a joke.
The lesson from five rounds was that a planet on its own has nothing to remember: it's a circle with no silhouette. Round 6 was the Owner's idea, and the turning point — the planet as a character, lounging in his own ring with sunglasses on. Suddenly it had a face, a pose and a mood, and the crew's drawing style worked, because now there was a character for it to wrap around.
Round 7 gave him arms and legs so he could properly recline, and asked for several drafts at once with room for variation. Good, but not great: his ring turned into a pool float, he stopped looking like Neptune, and everything was one shade of blue.
Round 8 put his own planetary ring back under him and gave the picture one warm accent: a sunset reflected in his sunglasses, the only orange in a world of blue, and the first thing you see. That's the one in use now — a working mark, good enough to ship, with room to refine later rather than spending more rounds on small differences.
It holds up small, too: shrunk to a browser tab, the sunset in the lenses is still the thing you notice. Each round's image is kept alongside the reason it was set aside, so this record is the real sequence, not a reconstruction. All art here comes from image generation.