Most recent – My D&D Setting: Infinis Ajer
I’m a particular fan of Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons, but more particularly the design philosophy of Paizo’s Pathfinder 2nd Edition. After years of playing this table-top role-playing game with friends, I figured it was time to write and design my own content instead of the pre-written adventures intended by companies like Wizards or Paizo.
I decided to write my own world setting for the game on a gigantic scale. The core premise of the world of Infinis Ajer is that it is fueled particularly by human faith. What human cultures believe is in turn made reality. Thus, societal concepts, like gods, religions, or the imagined way the world should work all rapidly change at the hands of humanity’s collective belief in their surroundings. It’s an idea I thought of while exploring art history and the vivid worlds imagined by completely different cultures for the same concepts.
Another result of this faith is that Infinis Ajer has restarted itself over completely from memory hundreds of times each time this faith reaches a boiling point and creates problems – such as The Seraph of Cinder – unbound by Gods and controlled fully by people. This Seraph nearly ends the world each generation, but is instead slain in a particular way, sparing life as we know it and instead burning away the collective memory of the entire world. While the physical artifacts and ruins of previous societies still exist, the ancestries of the world forget everything and start over from the stone age, gradually building layer after layer over previous cities, adapting their technology, customs, and culture as their own.
Figures like the Marshall of Ash guarded those from other dimensions from Cinder’s flame, like the Plane of Shadow.
It was in college at CU Denver I was able to apply my concepts into tangible design. One example of such explores a enormous city in Infinis Ajer, inspired by steampunk and ancient Egyptian mythology. I’ve seen plenty of RPGs approach various mythos, but it tends to be quite Eurocentric. I wanted to show a fantastical, gigantic megalopolis city made of many districts, each as big as New York in size. This place is known as Khoursara, the City of Seven Sentinels. The “Sentinels” are towering spires that climb into the heavens surrounding the city’s walls.
To begin, I made a deck of cards both for use with the game setting as well as set in the universe itself, as if you could purchase such cards from a Khoursaran merchant.
I also designed a mockup for what a setting book for Khoursara might look like, as I intend to someday publish my writing, designs, and illustrations to the greater community.
Another project within my D&D setting and in Khoursara, “MIDRA,” saw my first foray into 3D animation. Wanting to continue on my writing specifically into Khoursara further, I decided to recreate a setting with some fog, megalithic structures, and a bit of eldritch horror suspended in the ancient technology. I was inspired by Kid A by Radiohead, and more specifically the song from that album, Everything in Its Right Place. That song gave me the direction to tackle the vastness of the Sentinels surrounding the city of Khoursara, and what lie within their unfathomably huge spires.
Tabletop Event Design – WizCon
Another project I had for my second design studio class was to alter an existing event and propose, with research, how to improve or rework it. My choice was the already existing conventions within the tabletop gaming hobby for games like D&D, Magic: The Gathering, and more card board games, but with a focus on representation for marginalized communities that are often excluded from feeling like part of the community. My proposal took the shape of what I called “WizCon,” which not only could celebrate the long life Wizards of the Coast has breathed into this hobby of ours, but also as a step in the right direction towards representing their full community. Part of the brief involved infographics, as well as a hypothetical floor plan and schedule for the convention, complete with panels and speakers.
Tabletop App Development – Oblex
Another project was from my UX/UI Class, in which we could attempt to mockup and program an app that would solve a niche, particular problem. I wanted to create one that could bring the instant messaging of Discord (or other social media) alongside the tools Game Masters could use to run their tabletop games or board games live for their friends. My resulting project was “Oblex,” where I mainly focused on designing the interactions with every single button and page to allow for gameboard movement while typing commands to roll dice, much like a Discord automated bot would do. My other focus was to bring livestreaming even to mobile, to enable games recorded or streamed to an audience on the go from any device.
A link to the app mockup can be found here.
Self-Employment – Colgi Minis, a Miniature 3D Printing Company
Another huge part of my life has been taking this tabletop hobby into a business I founded in 2021 with my partner in life, Min. We originally 3D printed models for D&D and board games on our UV resin printer, and one day decided to try things marketing them online. It took off in ways I couldn’t have ever imagined, and eventually we intend to market not just the licensed models from commissioned artists, but our own sculpts as well. I designed and built the framework for our marketing, including social media presence, thumbnail design, stickers, miniature photography editing, running seasonal sales, and uploading hundreds of unique listings.
Colgi Miniatures can be found here on our Etsy page!
We’re in the middle of designing our own site away from Etsy as well, which I created a mockup for in my Design Studio II Class.
Current Work – The Sentry Student Newspaper
Recently (2020 – Present), I’ve been Writer, Copy Editor & Illustrator for The Sentry student newspaper at CU Denver. It’s been a rewarding experience, going from contractual work with articles and illustrations here or there, all the way up to editing the copy directly alongside the other head section editors.
Here’s an example of my illustration work on the front cover, and my other illustrations:
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Review 
Sentry Halloween 2022 Award Winner 
Pokemon Card Review 
Dispelling Myths on Socialism 
Daft Punk Retrospective
Older Work – Webcomic: HYPNOGOGIA
These pieces are all apart of a current project of mine: A webcomic titled Hypnogogia, which is written, drawn, and conceptualized by me. The setting of the science fiction story is an alternate reality to our own, on a planet called Hiraeth. With a world so connected and progressive, such technology easily fell into the wrong hands – setting the stage for a society ruled by force-fed simulated dreams.
2 + 2 = 5 is another part of the story, acting as a poster and landscape of one of the locations within the story.
The Narrative is another element of the world of my story is a magical book which crashed down on Hiraeth in ancient times. This book explained a key element of how the universe worked, leading to rapid progression for humanity in this timeline. This book, seemingly coming from space itself, was dubbed simply as “The Narrative,” and is said to grant its user both the knowledge and ability to alter the fabric of reality itself: a reality which they realize was made up entirely of microscopic butterflies. I created a physical version of The Narrative for an IB (International Baccalaureate) Art project, along with many other pieces detailed below that feature characters from the story.
Various character designs for Hypnogogia, including the protagonists (Switchboss and Mercyboss), and some of their adversaries (The Abyssal and Meraki).
Ambo-Membrum Inferius Schematic was an IB Art project intended to begin introducing one of the main characters, Mercyboss into the art surrounding my story. Using the idea of medical blueprints for prosthetic limbs, I wanted to create story ques to lead any keen-eyed readers further with characters in the story, as well as continue the tone of cyber-retro-futuristic punk design. The overall ideas for pieces such as these are to be singular pieces of information that give few clues and keep viewers guessing and drawing more information as they find more artifacts like this blueprint for what is happening.
Whispers of the Crystalline Desert was a digital painting for another location in the world of Hiraeth. It represents a landscape both in my story’s setting, and a character’s mind, that being TRQ (The Robobot Queen). The idea is that a character, represents the creative side of the split brain theory, and the landscape of the Crystalline Desert where she wanders in the present time of the story. She literally sees the world in dreamlike moments, unsure of reality, dancing in the desert. I drew the piece using PaintTool SAI2 and finally adjusting my overall colors to the triad color scheme to meet my vision of the bizarrely geometric and surreal desert concept.
Hiraeth, The World You Never Knew was my pretend documentary set in my world functioning as a warning and expositional piece. The villain in the story, Petrichor took all of the issues with humanity and silenced them by forcing everyone into a constant state of dreaming. If the populace sees exactly what they want to see, they do not complain of the censorship of our valuable historical lessons of our history. The voice acting done by myself, editing, work, and sources cut into the final piece, inspired by John Carpenter’s ‘They Live,’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
A Map of the World of Hiraeth. This began as a hand-drawn concept, then was scanned, then digitally reproduced so that I could use it for further storytelling purposes for Hypnogogia.
Local Community & School – Graphic Design Projects
During my Junior and Senior years at Centaurus High School I designed several CSQUAD Poster Designs for the school’s event organizing team, CSQUAD. These had a color scheme matching the school’s red and blue mascot. Each one was for a specific purpose, with requirements in mind of the tone. The CSQUAD Personnel Meeting poster, for example, had to portray a lot of information, yet still be able to catch the viewers eye. Cramfest was much more of a homemade feeling to tie into the calm and enticing event before finals week.
This poster design was to support La Raza, which is a Denver based organization that advocates and raises money and promotes youth leadership especially in poverty-stricken Latino communities, as well as advocating for culturally responsive human services to all Colorado communities in need.
For more information, visit: http://serviciosdelaraza.org/
MarchFourth is a band I made a poster design for in the summer of 2015 for a contest. My inspiration for the poster was to portray the band’s motto; ‘This band is your band,’ visually. Thus, I considered heavily on Russian-era propaganda, as well as American recruitment posters for inspiration given the ‘sharing community’ and overall red color the band is recognized for. The poster won second place from a class vote, but when the band members went to see them they chose mine instead for first place.
College – CU Denver’s CAM Design Program
Eyes of the Beheld was a project I made for my freshman year. I purposefully wanted to integrate an illustration overlaid on a QR code. Getting this to work functionally as well as portray my message (of drawing viewers deeper into the world without words) effectively was difficult, but was an interesting and great way to practice hierarchy, layering, and framing. Another element of the project was mocking it up digitally in a real-world setting.
Worlds Logotype is a short video I animated to represent emblem of my identity and online presence as colebotman. The music used is j^p^n’s Scarce, and through use of Adobe After Effects, I was able to time each vectored shape to the music itself.
The Typeface Assignment from my freshman year was a project in which I was able to create a title typeface for my comic, inspired by the visual themes from it. It was interesting to work with repeated modular elements, such as in the lowercase especially was the circle-dot eye or set of triangular pupil to symbolize the strange, always-being-watched tone, while still being a modern sans-serif.
The Essence Project during my second semester of my freshman year allowed us to explore design in terms of feeling and visual portrayal of a broad concept. For mine, I decided to go with the essence of Memory. The word to me spoke of thousands of years of human evolution, falling short only in one respect: The ability to clearly pass down memories and experiences of life. While information can be written and cataloged, what makes each individual truly unique is lost to time.
Thus, I was really inspired by the incredible 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell for inspiration on portraying the idea of the human form being merely a shell to carry our legacy within. I went with a robed female character concept in grays and blues, to look porcelain, mechanical, cracked with time and only a fragment of the pieces that are lost overtime, with broken contrasting yellow typography to emphasize mending the old into the new.
The Charon Sheet is a project I worked on that was a challenge in subverting the expectations of the customer’s anticipated view of a Dungeons & Dragons product. I have always been a huge fan of D&D and Pathfinder, but found that introducing the game and creating characters involved a lot of information and organization that isn’t apparent immediately when you purchase the starter versions of the games. So, I went with a more updated and modern look – turning the character sheet into a book that could store all of your information, while having a simple and fun design that pays homage to mimics, which are creatures that disguise as objects to trick unsuspecting adventurers. With this, I went for a simplistic box, and a hand-stitched, silly looking two-sided clasp that would serve as a closed eye as the book is closed, and a tongue when opened to show the mouth where the pages would go.
For this project, we were supposed to create a Brand Redesign for a product we were familiar or interested in. I went with one of my favorite recent games, Death Stranding. This is a new game by the infamous Hideo Kojima, and is recognized for its weird flair and bizarre plot inlaid with heavy metaphors and symbolism. The core of the game’s mechanics are to transport heavy cargo from one place to another, mostly on foot, establishing the game’s theme of connections in a destroyed world. For this design, I went for a new version of the game’s special edition. I went for a sliding metallic container look, wrapped in the game’s recognizable ‘void-if-tampered-tape.’ I vectored the sheen of the metal based on a texture I created in real life, and wanted to wrap the tape and branded ‘Bridges’ emblem around the box as realistically as possible using my digital tools.
The Varia Emergency Survival Kit was a project in which I could take an existing brand or design, and repackage it with a new line within the brand itself. For this, I took one of my favorite game series of all time (Metroid) and created the concept for a ‘grab-and-go’ case with a special edition Nintendo Switch console, themed around the typical red and white medical red cross, and an emblem of Samus’s helmet, with orange as a secondary color.
VIRGIL is a short animated sequence in which I practiced my ability to animate motion graphics and tracked designs using footage from the game Halo 3: ODST from Bungie software. The game is a very mystery-noire oriented aesthetic, with rain pouring down in an alien-invaded city. As such, treatment of my applied motion graphics mostly revolved around conveying the futuristic focus on keeping track of important data, all in the form of the game’s AI character, VIRGIL (the city’s Superintendent).
Farsight EXPO was a project in which we could create an Adobe design conference with a theme, and proceed to do all of the marketing, such as collateral, digital, and print work that would be used at a large convention, housing thousands and thousands of people. The design challenge here was to make a simple enough set of pieces that could be rearranged into many different mediums – from pens, postcards, and other paraphernalia that can be small and detailed, to large banners that must be legible from the street or from the grounds below.
In the Denver Pop Culture Con Website, I designed a website concept in HTML and CSS for the Denver Popular Culture Convention (formerly known as Denver Comic-Con). I learned much about the organization of websites, including adaptive and responsive interfacing, legibility of different menus, and how to design something that will be interacted with by presumably a large variety of people who may attend. Additionally, I created a poster design and animated gif that would play as an ad in an online space.
Another marketing campaign project in class was to create a memorable brand using only a very basic and recognizable insignificant object. I chose a screw because on its own it has little use. I ended up inventing a strong-sounding brand I named “BASTION,” in order to elevate it as a beacon of light in the dark. People might see screws as boring, but I wanted them to be perceived as vital to disaster rebuilding efforts, or keeping homes safe during natural disasters. The project called for full hi-fi logos and UI, mockup renders, and usability consideration.
