Shire
Halflings
A brand, a hand-drawn generative pipeline and a launch site for a 10,000-character NFT collection on Elrond that never reached mint. Kept online out of pride, and about to become a game.
Every studio has a project that did not ship and that it still shows people. Mine is Halflings: ten thousand small, cheerful, hand-drawn characters, each with a title, an occupation and a personality, destined for the Elrond blockchain in the second quarter of 2022 and never quite arriving there. The site at shire.land is still up. I call it a monument, and I am not embarrassed about it.
what I did
The Halflings were the characters for a crypto project by a small group of collaborators, and I was responsible for the parts that had to look and feel like something. That meant the brand, from the crystal-ball motif to the purple-on-midnight palette that survives in the site’s theme colour. It meant the launch site itself, with its whitepaper, dark mode, social cards and a self-hosted, do-not-track analytics instance, a level of finish most token projects of the period did not bother with. And it meant consulting on the roadmap and on where revenue would come from, the questions a designer is rarely invited to ask.
The larger job was the generative pipeline. Ten thousand unique characters cannot be drawn one at a time, but they can be assembled from layers, provided someone draws every layer. I drew all of them by hand: every body, garment, expression and accessory, in variants that would combine cleanly. The writing went the same way. Titles, occupations and personalities were all written by us rather than produced by a model, with logic that chose among them according to a character’s other attributes, so that a Halfling’s job and temperament would suit its appearance. The result was a population, not a lottery.
the chain went quiet
We were ready to seek approval on Elrond at precisely the moment enthusiasm for new launches on that chain was fading. Resistance from the ecosystem, and the market’s general loss of appetite for the category through 2022, meant Halflings never went to mint. We produced a prototype run instead: roughly fifteen proto-Halflings, minted for free, as proof that the pipeline worked end to end. Elrond has since rebranded as MultiversX. The Halflings remain on the old name, which feels right.
What did the project leave behind? Two things. The first is skills: generative systems, layered art at scale, and a launch site built to a standard I have kept since. The second is a stance on hype. Having built something careful for a market that rewarded speed, I came away sceptical of momentum as a brief. If you came to me today with a token-based idea, my first question would be what the thing is for once the excitement has passed.
the halflings look for a home
The site will shortly move to a secondary address, freeing shire.land for the next chapter. The ten thousand characters, still homeless, are to become the cast of a text-based role-playing game for browsers and phones, set in their Shire. It is an outcome the original project could not have planned for and, on reflection, a better use of ten thousand hand-drawn personalities than a spreadsheet of token IDs.
A project that failed to launch and produced a game, a discipline and a brand I am still proud of is not, on the whole, a failure. It is simply a longer story than the one we pitched.