Northern Star Pogo Illustration Belt Buckle Design
The Northern Star Pogo site, located southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, is one of the ore reserves owned by Northern Star Resources Limited, a global gold producer. As an ongoing graphic design vendor for the company, I was tasked with creating a belt buckle design that captures the essence of the site’s iconic machinery and equipment.
The project required three versions of the belt buckle design: a full-color version, a line-only version, and the final belt buckle version. Throughout the design process, I collaborated with the processing manager, who provided various reference images, including the SAG mill, furnace, operators in silver PPE, and a truck.
I began by mocking up a rough composition based on the supplied images. After receiving feedback, I proceeded to create the full-color vector design, followed by the line version. I worked from the most complex version to the simpler ones by progressively simplifying the elements.
For both the color and line designs, monochromatic versions were created to reflect Northern Star’s brand colors. When developing the belt buckle version, I considered the design’s 3D molding process. To communicate this effectively to the manufacturer, I created a version where the lightest areas represented the most embossed parts of the design, and the darkest areas represented the most debossed.
