Dirt: How to design NFTs
Q&A with Dirt's NFT artist.
Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.
Daisy Alioto talks with artist and designer Mark Costello, who created Dirt’s animated NFTs, about Beeple, our newsletter’s goofy mascot, and how NFTs are like theater.
This newsletter’s current season of content (we’re paying around $500 per post, pitch us!) is funded by our sale of NFT art editions that happened last month. People buying the editions of 100, 30, and 1 are the reason you’re getting so much good stuff in your inbox. Mark Costello, an artist and interactive designer, designed the NFTs, animating Dirty’s drips and coloring the sweet gradient backgrounds. Here’s a behind-the-scenes conversation about the best approach to making NFT art.
All our NFT editions are sold out but you can trying buying one on the secondary market!
Daisy Alioto: Do you remember where you were when you first heard about NFTs? What was your first reaction?
Mark Costello: Colleagues started shouting about them in our nerdy office Slack channel in late 2020 when Beeple’s early drops started reselling for mind-boggling numbers. The reactions were part bewilderment and part envy. It’s endearing to go back and read Slack and text messages with friends from even six months ago because we were so confused at first. It was the blind leading the blind while we figured out how it all worked, but it didn’t take long for the confusion to be replaced with a sense of curiosity and possibility.
DA: Have you dabbled in cryptocurrency before?
MC: If only! But I’m learning that it’s never too late.
DA: Why did you agree to this project?
MC: The chance to be an early adopter in this sphere and make something fresh alongside the Dirt team is enticing. It feels like it can be anything we want it to be and we can shape the project in so many directions. For me, it’s less about dollar signs in the eyes (though it’s pretty awesome how much the drop raised!) and more about figuring out how we can use the tech to build out a world and create an open club that makes the Dirt experience deeper. As a child of the Beanie Baby era, I feel like collectibles are part of our generation’s consciousness, and the opportunity to create our very own version of Pokémon cards feels very natural.
DA: What is the essence of Dirty? How would you describe him in three words?
MC: I think Dirty’s essence is in those big anime eyes, so lovable. As I worked with Kyle to figure out the design, those eyes were a crucial piece. Dirty is silly, dependable, and maybe a little chaotic. Definitely that one friend who is always down for a night out at your favorite dive bar and orders the beer-shot deal for the whole table and picks the best tracks on the jukebox.
DA: What is Dirty’s zodiac sign?
MC: I confess I don’t know much about astrology… I turned off the Co-Star notifications after like a month. But Dirty is probably an earth sign, right?
DA: Do you have a favorite edition of the first three we put out?
MC: The Pearl Pink colorway hits it out of the park! The animation really pops off the screen against that gradient. It kind of feels like a rising sun. I want one. I actually made like ten gradient versions because I wasn’t sure what would work best, but seeing the finals chosen they feel like the only possible options.
DA: Does your background in creating multimedia for the stage figure into your digital design at all? Is it difficult to move from the physical realm of design to the digital and back again?
MC: Yeah I think so! Aside from the literal technical aspects that I’m using the same software & tech to create the designs, I feel like NFTs and theatrical liveness both have a sort of fleeting ethereality. They both feel frustratingly and pleasantly indiscernible by nature. An NFT is this amorphous art piece that exists right there in your hand but is also gone in an instant, whether by selling it or your phone dying or whatever, and for some reason it kind of parallels theater’s existing-in-the-moment intangibility for me. There is a theatrical campiness to Dirty that makes him so malleable and well suited to being an animated NFT. The medium and the message are well matched.
But besides that, creating this feels worlds away. Usually when I design for IRL, the multimedia design is a single aspect of the whole, and it’s usually in collaborative conversation with the stage design or the actors or the audience, if we’re lucky. It’s a very controlled viewing environment. How Dirty is experienced is totally different for an infinite amount of factors, and we have no idea where editions go from here. I wonder what sort of control we have over how Dirty is viewed or interacted with at all? I think that curating the conversation is just as vital but much less obvious to me in this realm, let alone how you control it. I suppose I’ll keep learning from you and the Dirt crew. It feels like a meditative exercise in letting go; I don’t know how you writers do it.
DA: I know you also have a background in puppetry, do you think Dirty could make it as a puppet?
MC: Dirty has all the criteria for an amazing puppet. A little adorable, a little humanoid, a little weird. A fun part of creating this gif was jumping off the still illustrations that Jason Adam Katzenstein made and figuring out how this version of Dirty dripped and moved and animated, which is pretty similar to beginning work with a puppet. My expertise is puppetry on camera so creating this feels like a no brainer. Let’s make it, film it, mint it for sale.
DA: Yes or no: Dirty! The Musical
MC: If Ratatouille can pull it off so can we! — By Daisy Alioto