Secret Identity is always looking for avenues to express our creativity and help others realize their dreams. We do this through graphic design, print, web/mobile development, media production, and creative consultation. It’s our passion and the reason S.I. exists.
Recently, we began developing our pop culture universe, SIR&D: Secret Identity Research & Development. It’s yet another way to have fun and create new and exciting things in the design and pop culture crossroads we occupy. We started to wonder out loud during the conception of this new project. “What if we built a platform that would allow creators to do this exact same thing?” We’ve been toying with the idea for years but have been unable to get it off the ground. It’s time to stop procrastinating. We are forcing our hand and building the platform; now you get to watch it happen and hold us accountable.
Building a pop culture platform: part 1
To start, we looked at our available assets, including internal brands, technology stacks, design assets, and general concepts we could reuse. One key to efficient design is not to reinvent the wheel. If we have usable assets, we will surely put them to good use. Lucky for us, we had a viable brand waiting to resurface, which offered us some interesting avenues for branding, design systems, and scalability. Enter Big Large Huge.
What is Big Large Huge?
Big Large Huge is an entertainment brand we created years ago as a foot in the door of the pop culture space. It was a platform a group of creators used to post reviews and opinions on video games, professional wrestling, technology, comic books, and much more. We had a weekly podcast called “The BroadCast” that covered our week in gaming, and general friendly chats. The brand went dormant in 2013 as life took each member in different directions. Lucky for us, we can rekindle the flame of Big Large Huge and reformat it to fit our new, exciting mission.
What is the mission exactly?
I’m glad you asked. Our new mission is to build a platform that allows unprecedented collaboration between creators. The community’s creativity facilitates the building of worlds. It’s a lofty goal and one that needs more clarity. But we will get to that in a future update. In the meantime, let’s call it Project Retcon.
Next Steps
This is the first step of many on our journey to building our own platform. We’ve created content, design assets, systems, and shows for many platforms, including The Popverse, DC.com, and IGN. All amazing pop culture publications diligently create fantastic content for us all. We want to be in that conversation! But to do so, we needed a direction we were excited to follow through on. We simply can’t compete with other platforms on the written content front. But we can carve out a pretty happy corner of the internet by facilitating content creation and community collaboration.
Let’s recap. We have our in-house brand Big Large Huge that we will tailor in this series to fit our new direction. We have several technology stacks we need to review to see which can help us scale and thrive on the back end (we don’t want an Overwatch 2 situation on our hands). If you are a developer with insight into the best tech stack for 2023, drop us a line, and let’s talk about it. We also need to develop a fresh design system that is scalable, versatile, and appropriate to the mission.