Thor Ragnarok Language of Sakaar
I was involved early in pre-production on the film, and my first task was to extract some key shapes and ideas from Kirby's wonderful original work. We used the comic art and graphical style as a key point of the film, sometimes applied quite literally in the character and environment design.
I did initial studies and envisioned some key glyph styles for 5 languages. These principal characters were then developed further with Alice Gluszyk, our head of graphics in the art dept; and eventually turned into what became the final 36 character set.
These were all developed during my first days at Marvel, it was a nerve wracking time - but I settled into the art department quickly and felt at home playing with such a fun design challenge, concepting alien languages! just like the very symbols that had inspired me in Starwars all those years ago!
The original idea was that each character had a central planet that would link up between symbols as words were made, charting a course through the planetary system! these characters would eventually become the core symbols of the Sakaarian Language!
Sakaarian characters painted down Thor's Chest Armour piece!
An example of the original Kirby work that heavily inspired the language of Sakaar
My first iteration, inspired by organic Kirby shapes
A more angular, rigid style exploration
A simplified, angular structure
A very Kirby shape driven language, with varying thicknesses, this one was out there!
An example of the written character strands joined
I designed and detailed the spaceship interface panels of the commodore; it was great fun to cover them with languages!
Symbols underneath the Commodore!