 I'm going to tell you the cold hard truth. These videos suck. These old ones where I tell you how to design a Spider-Man suit, not good at all. So I've been thinking about how I can make a better and way more comprehensive video that combines all of my knowledge of Spider-Man suits into one video. And I've finally found my answer. I'm going to make one video that has several chapters, each being a specific core tenet of what I think is important to Spider-Man design philosophy. We're going to cover theming, color formatting, consistency, logo work, lens work, and accessories. After this video, hopefully my ideas will be fully fleshed out to you and you'll be able to make some pretty critically good designs. Of course I understand that not everybody will agree with everything I say as most of my ideas are entirely based on subjectivity, but I will not deny that my ideas about Spider-Man costumes are heavily respected and I am hoping that I can show why the community respects me here. I am also open to debating on whether or not some of my ideas hold up. Now with that out of the way, I'm going to show you how you can design your very own Spider-Man suit. Of course the first question to ask when designing is, what is the theme for my Spider-Man costume? A theme can be anything. For example, the Iron Spider suit is Iron Man themed. You can tell by its color palette and the metallic shine it gives off. But it has a one suit as theme to be edgy, proven by its more complex weblines and sharper emblems. But the worst thing that can happen to your Spider-Man suit is for it to have a theme that isn't conveyed all too well. This can happen when your suit has too many conflicting elements. For example, whenever people try to combine Spider-Man and Captain America's suits, it just does not work. You're taking the themes of America and washing out all of the spidey aspects from the original costume. If that's the case, why does the original Iron Spider work? That's because Iron Man has a fairly bland costume. Notice the lack of any symbols or iconography. You could argue the arc reactor is his symbol, but it's just a triangle that glows up. It's nothing compared to like a spider or a star. The most iconic part about Iron Man is his armor and his color scheme, so mixing it in with a costume that already has a super apparent spider iconography works. Because Iron Man's costume lacks any significant iconography, unlike Captain America's. Spider-Man and Captain America both have very apparent themes. They have either spiders, stars, stripes, or webs, and combining these two suits cannot work without sacrificing significant iconography on one of them. It causes the two designs to clash against one another, and one costume usually ends up having more representation in the costume than the other. This is why the Iron Spider works so well, because all of Iron Man's important design traits, such as his color palette and metallic shine, work well with Spider-Man's, because while Spider-Man's chest spider can be front and center, the rest of the suit is fully Iron Man-themed. There's no fighting for turf on this costume at all, because it's already reached perfect homeostasis. When you're picking a theme for a costume, think to yourself, is this theme well thought out? Is there too much going on with my costume? Does the theme overcomplicate the design? Before we get into color formatting, I'd like to show you guys a rule I invented in a previous video, which is the superhero color costume rule. Your superhero costume should be constructed out of a primary color, a secondary color, and an accent color, and of course you have your exceptions. Your primary color is the most important part of the suit. It should be the first color you think of when you picture your costume. It should be placed so that it takes up at least 45% of your costume. Which should absolutely cover all important parts of your suit. For example, Spider-Man's mask is fully red, and if you think of Spider-Man's costume, the first color that will probably come to mind is red. Good choices for primary colors are colors that are visually striking. For example, a bright red or a cobalt blue. Your secondary is the color that supports the primary color on your costume, and fills in everywhere where your primary color isn't, and of course you have your accent colors. Your accent color should be viewed as anything that decorates your costume. For example, Spider-Man's web pattern, or his eyes. If your primary color takes up about 45% of your suit, and your secondary color also takes 45, your accent color should probably only take about 10% of your suit's color. You should only have about four different colors on your costume at most, including any more than that can complicate the design. And honestly, I don't think I've seen a good superhero costume that includes any more than four. Hey, but if you know any, tell me about them in the comments. Now that we've gotten the costume color roll out of the way, let's finally get in the how to balance the colors out on your costume. There's a lot of different ways you can balance out your costume's colors, and I'll demonstrate by showing off some costumes I like that have really good color balancing. The Spider-Gwen suit, specifically from Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse. Spider-Gwen's suit goes for a sort of half-white and half-black theme, where the top half is white, and the bottom half is black. The black cuts up the white to frame her chest, but at the end of the day, the top half is white, and the bottom half is black. But to introduce some more differences in between these two sections, they added a hot pink accent color to the white sections, and a cyan blue accent color to the black ones. Not only do we have two very interesting color palettes coming together into one costume, but we also have the cyan and pink mimicking how the black and white interact by having them interact outside of their set places on their respective colors. The cyan webs decorate the pink on the white sections, and pink shading lights the black sections of Spider-Gwen's body. Spider-Gwen's costume is a work of genius. Its color balancing is all about contrast, and how very two different elements can work together while also contrasting one another. Now let's talk about a few costumes that I don't think succeed at color balancing as well as Spider-Gwen's costume, and compare them to one that I think does a pretty good job itself. Here we have three costumes. Spider-Gwen's 2099, Miles Morales into the Spider-Verse suit, and the black suit. As you can tell, they all have a very similar layout, but only one of these costumes successfully balances out the colors. These are all a standard one color costume with the second color doing the rest of the work. We have secondary colors on the arms, face, and chest. But notice how the 2099 suit and the black suit both failed to carry out their secondary colors onto the lower ends of their costumes, while Miles Morales costume succeeds by including red souls. While Miles Morales costume balances out the red all over his body, 2099 and the black suits both have their colors drop off the waist area, leaving the bottom unbalanced. These suits are what I'd call top heavy, as their colors mostly stick around the top of their costume. While these costumes still do look great, I can't help but think about how these costumes are somewhat unbalanced, and could be balanced out with some minor tweaks. At the end of the day, what you should learn from this exercise is that you should always be thinking about how the colors you've chosen for your suit are balanced out onto the rest of your suit, and ensure you have the perfect amount of color on all different parts of your costume. This element is one of the most important parts of any Spider-Man outfit or any superhero outfit in general. All of the elements mentioned before and after this one will need to implement consistency. Your theme for your suit? It needs to be consistently implemented throughout most elements of the suit. Implementing good color balancing is part of creating good consistency. If your costume is inconsistent, it can throw off your entire design. For example, let's look at the Spider-Man Beyond Suit. The entire reason that people freak the fuck out about this costume is because of the massive Spider logo on the front being off-center. But I know how you could fix this without centering the Spider logo. I feel like if the rest of the costume leaned into being off-center, people wouldn't have hated it as much. But if you boil down the issue to its core, the reason people didn't like this costume was because it was inconsistent, inconsistently asymmetrical. The logo is one of the most important parts of your Spider-Man outfit. If you're making a Spider-Man costume for a movie, the logo will probably be used for branding. So make sure it looks good. Make sure your logo works a near theme. Look at the Tazimone suit. The logo is sharp, thin, and jagged and almost scary looking, just like the Spider suit it's on. If your logo is big, make sure it works into the formatting of your costume. Sort of like how the Tazim2 Spider logo has its Spider legs shift inward to fit into the red arrow that goes down Spider-Man's suit. If your logo is smaller, make sure it doesn't get lost within your web pattern. This can be done by including a space for you to fit a Spider within the web pattern or changing the color of the Spider to make it break away from the color of the webs. But if you have more than one Spider logo, it is incredibly important that you use logos that both have similar elements to one another. For example, let's look at these two Spider emblems from the Spider-Man Raimi movies. Both of them have sharper elements, multiple different leg joints, more detailed Spider heads, and similar abdomens on their Spiders. These logos have perfect synergy. I don't think anyone can disagree that logo synergy isn't a good thing. I had some Dumbos in the past say it was stupid because of free will or whatever, but like, no, your logo should look similar. It just looks better that way. I don't know what to tell you. Like, look at these two. Are you going to tell me that these logos work well together? No, they don't. This classic Spidey logo is thick and chunky, and this other Spider logo is thin, has several jointed legs, and a more anatomically correct approach to making a Spider logo. These two logos just would not work well together. Your lenses need to work pretty much the same way your logos do. They need to fit in with your theme and they need to work organically within your web design if you have one. Let's look back again at the Tazimone suit lenses. The lenses are small and sharp. The lenses aren't white. As if they were white, they would give the costume too bright of a color. But since they're yellow, it almost makes the lenses look off-color and makes the eyes appear to be rotted or less pure. This benefits the suit's already sinister look. These lenses are a great example of working a theme into your lens design. A general rule of thumb is that rounder lines give off a friendlier look, while straight and jagged lines give off a more menacing feel. You don't have to use the basic Spider-Man lenses either. Let's look at Spider-Man 2099 again. These lenses are not traditional Spider-Man eyes, yet they still imply a more menacing tone via their strict lines and pointy shapes, fitting Spider-Man 2099's character. Now there's only so many accessories you can add to a Spider-Man suit before it gets too crowded. Webshooters, those are fine. You can add web shooters to almost any Spider-Man costume without, like, a huge loss in quality. But then a utility belt on top is too much. And so is a jacket. Okay, you get the point. There's only one suit that can properly display how to add accessories. And that's the original Scarlet Spider suit. Like, this costume is not a Spider-Man suit. It's more like a Spider-Man outfit. Ben Riley wears a blue hoodie without any sleeves, a utility belt, web shooters, and leg pouches. But underneath it all, it's just plain red spandex. But why? It's so simple. Exactly. If this costume had its own design and then had all these accessories thrown over it, it wouldn't look as good. It would make you confused, because why are you covering your design with all this outerwear? But the outerwear is the design of the Scarlet Spider suit. The hoodie and all of the gadgets are essential to the design, because without it, you just have a man in a red suit. But what can you learn from this costume? To think about how the accessories of your design is elements that need to work with the suit itself, and not just clothing items to be thrown over your costume. And that's about it. Uh, I just told you everything you need to know about what is necessary in designing a Spider-Man costume. And now, you can design your own Spider-Man costume and send it to my Discord server and the Fan Designs channel. And I'll make a video in a week or two critiquing your design. All you have to do is join the Discord and the link in my description.