The Creed Collection

Creed ~ The code we live by

A creed is a simplified statement that exemplifies a belief system or philosophy of a group. This creed makes it easy for those interested in a group to understand what it’s all about at a glance. A baseline agreed upon set of values or beliefs to determine if you would be in or out. If you weren’t good with the creed as a whole you could move on to the next group.

Creeds were initially used almost exclusively by religious groups not only as a way to encourage/discourage new members but as a way to guide the acting members in their discourse and theological pursuits. Some of the more famous ones are the Nicene Creed or Apostle’s Creed. Creed comes from Credo which is the Latin word meaning “I believe”. Over time the use of the word creed has become more secularized and more akin to values statement, honor code, or life saying, by any group or individual that cares to create one.

I am using  it here in a combination of both sacred and secular but in an extremely abbreviated way. By only using one word to represent not only a character trait that the beast represented has but also to represent a value to live by. The combination of the single words signifies the over all creed for that character. The beauty of using one word is the person wearing the design gets to decide what that full creedal statement becomes.

I think creeds, value statements, codes of conduct are important to have for our personal and corporate life. To sit and think through what you believe in, write it down and let that guide you, the decisions you make, and your character development, is a powerful tool for life.

The Collection

Creed was the first collection I created but I didn’t set out to do a bunch of collections at first. I just wanted to create some cool t shirt designs that I could wear. The first design I made for this whole BYC project was the Yeti Creed. After all it was the Bearded Yeti Coalition. As I finished that design I was inspired to do a collection of beasts some mythical and some living in the same style and the Creed collection was born.

I had a lot of graphic styles going on in my head for the beasts mugshot from hyper-realistic to black and white but I found the simplistic comic book/tattoo style suited my taste the best. Plus I couldn’t pull off the hyper real stuff anyway haha. One thing I did know from the start was, design wise I wanted to display these characters in an alpha/mean muggin manner with a few of their main character traits encircling or framing them as their creed.

Now, I know each beast could have strength or courage or ferociousness etc… but I felt it would be cheating to use the same character traits over and over. So I try to look at different areas of character specific to each beast. To be honest it’s kind of a pain to come up with new traits so i’m not ruling out that some traits may get reused as new designs come along but I am trying to keep it diverse 🙂