The original WWF SmackDown Champion title belt was one of the first ones that I made, way back when I was still experimenting and finding out what worked and what didn't. As such, this title belt lacked many of the refinements to the belt making process that I've since made standard, particularly the application of fixative spray. Over time, the black ink began to smear with the gold. While not automatically a bad thing in most belt designs, it was particularly nasty here because the "wire frame" images of the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin became difficult to see. So in as much as I was going to repair the belt, I decided to redo the design, as well.

Now, the original design borrowed heavily from the styling of the WWF World Heavyweight Champion belt that was around at the time. While I still wanted to use many of those same elements, I also wanted to incorporate some of the styles I learned from working on the other belts. Also, since the WWF recently changed their name to "WWE," I wanted to de-emphasize the WWF logo a bit (I still use the older WWF logo because it's part of the game's name). And, from my experience with the Ready 2 Rumble World Champ, I realized that having a reasonable amount of color in the design can look pretty cool, so I decided to color in the Rock and Austin images.

The belt design that resulted looked less like the WWF World Heavyweight Champion belt it was based on, but more like a SonBlock title belt! Also, this project further validated that repairing and/or revising an existing belt design is very easy.

Here are some images of the finished belt: