# what is "motorheadz"?

By [jvmi](https://paragraph.com/@jvmiart) · 2022-07-22

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_before you continue,_ [_press play and turn up the volume_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxzBvqY5PP0) _so we’re in the same headspace 🧠_

so the first illustration i made was just a product of me trying to recreate the [2016 cover of “‘boys don’t cry” magazine cover](https://hypebeast.com/2019/2/frank-ocean-boys-dont-cry-reissue-release) featuring a photoshoot of [frank ocean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtdXD2E-03k), one of my favorite musicians, which actually ended up being the alternate album artwork for blond.

![evolution of the first motorhead](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/a9161280ffebc301b3d0c2f701c95a68c77d4038ed0e6e98ad7a31d1744b239f.png)

evolution of the first motorhead

before then, i knew i wanted to drop a new nft collection on quixotic since i had just started working at optimism. i have definitely learned a lot about creating in the nft space these past couple of years, and wanted to treat whatever it was i was about to build differently than the previous project i worked on. i was going to make art, give it away for free, and focus on _visual expression_.

so i started drawing a few more designs + crafted a mood for how the project should feel-- the **vibe** is the only thing that _really_ matters. nostalgia is my favorite feeling, and when people look at the art i create, it is the feeling i want to convey. over the next couple of months, the artistic concepts for motorheadz stemmed from a combination of my environment + the result of me googling “cool motorcycle helmet“ at 3am before dropping my phone on my face.

![daft punk mood board](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/4c238008fd36c5ffc8f9a07478d01141f2b0d84c2886756c3df8a1e07bd96f4d.png)

daft punk mood board

as i was slowly creating the images, i began brainstorming ideas for what the website should be. i’ve recently started to develop a passion for building experimental websites and carry the perspective that a webpage is a new medium-- an interactive digital canvas.

videogames have been a huge lifelong interest of mine (i’ve got a goal to illustrate a videogame of my own one day). this daydream combined with the nostalgic undertone motorheadz already carried resulted in the early development of a jvmi original:

[the flameboy color](https://motorheadz.xyz/)™

can’t play a videogame without a console, and the nod to a gameboy in this design reflects my introduction to videogames as a kid. the crisp lofi startup sound aims to transport you into the shoes of a kid in the 90’s that pulled a gameboy out of their backpack after school.

i implemented the website in [typescript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) using [react](https://reactjs.org/) + [recoil](https://recoiljs.org/), and the whole thing is styled using custom css. the animations are mostly done with the [framer motion framework](https://www.framer.com/docs/) + some basic css animations. you can [check out the code for it here](https://github.com/imranjami/MotorHeadzGameboy), feel free to fork it and implement your own version of a gameboy site. it pretty much functions like a normal gameboy, except the colorway can be dynamically changed by clicking on the bottom left “select“ button.

![motorheadz flameboy colorways](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/133245c15e305aa0b3d191952c064997dee20be78c3b8a19bb642e1fb99a4676.png)

motorheadz flameboy colorways

...and that’s pretty much it for now. time will tell what the future of the collection will be, but for now it’s just a dope world of helmet-wearing, deeply saturated pixel headz livin’ in my rendition of my cousin’s old gameboy i got as a kid ❤️‍🔥✌🏽

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*Originally published on [jvmi](https://paragraph.com/@jvmiart/what-is-motorheadz)*