After the recent batch of stickers I felt like making something more authentic and tactile rather than jovial, CS is a more serious affair after all! A few months back I had the idea to make a police shield as the metallic effect worked really really well with the SWAG Sticker. So I came up with a few ideas about how to relate a police badge to CSGO.

When Gabe posted a few times on reddit his username was GabeNewellBellevue, which at first I found a little strange, but it made me realise how significant the location was to Valve as a company. As such I put 1 and 1 together and set upon making a fictitious badge for Valves home town. I assumed police badges were protected property so I avoided replicating the existing design of the Bellevue P.D. shield in favour of a more generic design.

I researched quite heavily looking at 100+ badges old and new. Originally I set out designing a more squarish shield with an eagle crest connected above it - however I later decided that looked too vintage, fiddly and prone to breakage so I replaced the two parts with a solid and curved unibody design. To make the eagle I first drew an outline for its shape, then fleshed this out with blended custom brushes to create the wing lines and body feathers.

The badge number changed a few times, originally it was Valves building number -- one too many digits! So it became the year Valve was founded (1996), and much later I changed this to 2012 - the year CSGO went live which felt more appropriate.

In choosing police departments SWAT was an obvious choice, but I needed another for variation. I settled on Vice as I grew up when the TV show Miami Vice was cool and Bellevue Vice had a cheesy ring to it, and secondly it could be argued that there are a lot of AWP wh ores that needed taking off the streets.

I preferred the smooth normal map for the SWAT badge, and the pitted map for the silver VICE one so it didn't bleach out too heavily when the light hit the shield background. Let me know which version you prefer!