The setting for HERO includes a covered shopping arcade known in Japan as a shotengai. I designed exterior facades for these buildings which included branding/signage and materiality. As most of these buildings exist as textura for the backgrounds I didn't invest too much time in developing them. Most have only one or two iterations. I did use them as a chance for trying a lot of different combinations.

The bookstore has prominence in the story so it got extra attention. I like how I used the spines of books as identifying signage with the name written on a volume sticking out.

The hair salon is on the corner with significant wall showing so I gave it a treatment of rough cut stone. When used in HERO the wall will have vines hanging on it.

The music shop signage is a staff with letters of the name acting as notes. Century Gothic worked well here.

Some of the shops are modern constructions of metal and stone and concrete, but there are also those that follow the wooden Japanese vernacular.

The signage here are dango, a Japanese sweet, cut in half with the kana written on them.

If this shop was more important than background textura, I would have gone with an exposed gearbox.