A design story: making of a sweatshirt
Last month there was an unofficial contest between designers to come up with a sweatshirt design for employees that are going to a 7-day company paid Alaska cruise.
We don’t get to do lots of print projects these days, not to mention something as cool as wearable. I had even more incentives because I was going to the trip and naturally I wanted my sweatshirt to look GOOD.
Narisa and I had a brief brainstorming and came up with 3 design concepts. First design was vintage travel posters inspired, illustration of traditional woodprint line art style featuring Alaska snowy mountains and forest scene on the backdrop, and our company mascot Felix at foreground.
Second one was spine off of the classic “I LOVE NY”, with love appears the shape of heart.
The third one is Tiki party drink. The design is a Mai Tai cup with a little cocktail umbrella hanging off the top. Where Tiki god face on the cup is replaced with Felix. Sounded corny? It’s actually my favorite concept of the 3 and I had most fun with it.
Tiki cup theme was designers’ favorite but the decision maker thought otherwise. The direction was to incorporating “I LOVE Alaska” tagline with the poster style Alaskan mountain View.
I was a little disappointed my top choice didn’t get pick, but the alternative was not so bad either.
Because the complicity of the vector arts to make up the scenic portion of the graphic, the screen printing shop asked me to separate the 2-color and send it to them as 2 separate files. Damn it, I thought that was supposed to be there job!
During the cruise trip, many of us, including myself got complimented from other passengers of our hoodies. I was even stop by a store clerk at Ketchikan, asking me where I got my hoodie. After telling her this is just company gift to employees, she said we should totally sell it online. She was very certain it’s going to do well. And to thank me for my involvement in this project, I got a $100 gift card to local fancy restaurant Wild Ginger.
All in all, the sweatshirt project turned out good.