objective.

CoinGenie is a brand that was conceived during the big cryptocurrency boom. I dunno the details about the industry or cryptocurrency at all, but I was tasked with creating a brand for this line of crypo-ATMs. The name was already decided, so it was up to me to generate the imagery around it. I wasn’t given much of a brief, but I wanted it to have a fantastical element to it.

solution.

Obviously the first few things that came to mind were blue genies. I doodles a few of those and a couple of magic lamps as well. It was all very Aladdin-y. I think if you were to ask most folks in the US to visualize a genie, they probably couldn’t help picturing the Robin Williams one. There was a big part of me that wanted to navigate away from that image and avoid playing into an already-established genie look. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense to steer into it.

If you made a genie green, people would think it was a goblin or something. Making it red gives it this charge of being dangerous, and say what you will about crypto but that isn’t something I wanted to reinforce about the market. In hindsight I could’ve given violet a shot or something, but blue just kinda felt right. Other influences be damned.

For one reason or another, I thought giving the genie more Middle-Eastern influences would give it some distinction from the Aladdin one. Gave him a big ol’ beard and a turban. There was an early sketch where I made him super ripped and buff, but after some discussion we had to ditch the body in favor of just a head shot. It seemed to be the better route for iconography, rather than having this thing be a full-blown mascot.