The Turbo Toad FC Home & Away Football Shirt

WTF!?

There’s no other way to describe it so we’ll come right out with it….

We designed Turbo Toad FC home and away football shirts.

They’re NFTs granting token-gated access to claim the physical.

They’re inspired by and created for the Turbo Toad Community. Here’s why…

Well, for a bit of context, we’ve been working on our startup, xG for the best part of a year. The mood music in crypto and web3 during the bear market has provided a bleak but never boring backdrop. From time to time, in between the catastrophic collapses of exchanges and SEC drama, projects crop up that remind you why this space can be exciting and fun - in the middle of this wave of building and exploring technology that will shape the future, there are people creating art, bringing people together - and doing crazy shit that’s just fun to be part of.

The Turbo origin story - and Rhett’s telling of that story, offered - ironically - a uniquely human take on the creation of a memecoin. The ingenuity of the process and the ongoing community energy sparked our imagination.

We’re in the process of creating football shirts as part of our main project, xG, and have been exploring custom kits and co-creation as a way for football players to be rewarded for quest milestones in the collecting experience we’re building for players. (More about xG and us here.)

So the idea of a shirt for $Turbo stemmed from that context. We loved the idea of creating something for the Turbo community that:

Honours the role of AI in the creation process
Is a suitably awesome shirt for community members to wear in real life
Provides funding for future Council / Prop House projects
Creates new assets and a talking point for the community
Generates some funding for our main project

So…. we went for it.

We’ve committed time, design resource and decided that this release should be limited in numbers in order to be a genuinely limited edition run - that’s also manageable.

So we’re creating 69 Home Shirt NFTs. If these mint out, we’ll also mint Away Shirt NFTs.

Each NFT gets access to a token-gated claim for the physical version, with worldwide delivery included in the mint price.

10 shirts (5 Home, 5 Away) will become available for community giveaways as sales progress.

The creation process

We consulted Chat GPT to guide the process, with Midjourney also playing a part.

AI told us to integrate clear references and iconography into the design and also to use AI in the actual artwork creation process where it made sense to.

For the visual work, time to make use of the Midjourney subscription.

One thing is very clear though…. to design a football shirt completely is not really plausible and comes out with some horrific results, so a hybrid approach was required, taking an understanding of the visual language of football shirts and $Turbo references that could occupy the design real estate in a way that helped tell a story.

Rocket emoji: no explanation required. The Beeple/Elon moment felt like lift-off.
$Turbo: the sponsor is prime real estate and we were reminded of Inter’s recent placement of their fan token here.
Anything Can Happen: the quote on the left sleeve comes from copy in the whitepaper.
The Club Crest: a refined version of some Midjourney suggestions.

Right Sleeve QR Code

There’s a QR code on the right sleeve which unlocks hidden content.

This is a feature that we think we’ll see more of in future, with clothing increasingly unlocking media, games, filters or spatial AR experiences.

The Shirt pattern

By far the most interesting element for us was going to be the shirt pattern. This is such a huge part in the aesthetics of football shirts and where the opportunity to combine process, AI- inspirde design within a short you;d actually want to wear.

We wanted it to be a distinctive shirt pattern, inspired by AI.

At this point it’s worth noting that we opted not to use any OpenAI logos or branding out of caution. We were aware of this having a commercial element and didn’t want to risk leaning too hard on the branding of a tech giant, giving off bootleg vibes - or indeed being torpedoed by a cease a desist.

Instead, we explored AI inspired art and found some incredible bold geometric patterns on the open AI website that we fed into midjourney with a view to generating hybrid versions. (There are so many great patterns we aren’t using.)

neilxg_minimal_geometric_patterns_with_a_repeating_elemnt_that_3905d955.png

neilxg_minimal_geometric_patterns_with_a_repeating_element_tha_704dbdfe.png

neilxg_minimal_geometric_patterns_with_a_repeating_element_tha_8faa3ad0.png

neilxg_minimal_bold_geometric_patterns_with_a_repeating_elemen_40cd97c4.png

In the end we found a core pattern, that scaled really nicely when wrapped around a shirt, creating two very different effects when viewed close up and from further afield.

🚨 Mint Live 🚨

Home Shirt Green - Mint now on Rarible

Max Supply: 69

Away Shirt Red - Mint now on Manifold

Max Supply: 420

Buy NFT to get the IRL shirt

For each NFT, holders will be able to claim an IRL physical shirt, with international shipping included.

Turbo Community Revenue

25% of sell out revenue will be awarded to the Turbo Token Council. 50% goes towards design, manufacture and shipping. The remaining 25% supports xG’s web3 grass-roots football project.

Physical Shirt Claim

A token-gated claim page will be set up on Shopify.

The Manifold token gating integration will enable holders to purchase their shirt for $0.

A shipping address will be required.