T-shirt Fun

Over the past couple months I've dabbled in a t-shirt design here and there for various reasons, so I thought I'd include a couple of them in a post. More designs are in the works, maybe some day soon I'll actually put some little label together dedicated to wearable art. I dig t-shirt design, but it would be so fun to put together skirts, purses, etc. Hopefully things should slow down at home soon, and I'll be able to break out my new screen and do some experiments!

1. For The Cure Shirt: A shirt I put together to help raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My purpose for designing this shirt was to create something that I personally would like to wear and hope that others would want to wear it as well. I like the idea of design that can benefit a cause without containing an image of a ribbon or helping hands. (I'm happy to get re-prints made if you are ever in need of a fund raising shirt for this organization. 100% of the profits will ALWAYS go to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.)

2. Love is All Shirt: A shirt commissioned by Soul Sister for the Indy Pride festival. They requested a rainbow bullseye and the tagline "Love is All" I wanted to incorporate urban imagery since it was a Downtown Indy festival so I included the buildings and spray paint. I originally had a few prominent buildings from downtown, but I wasn't sure if I should be concerned about the companies that own the buildings since I might be associating those companies with an event without getting permission, so I ended up making the buildings more of a general representation of the city. I also wanted to use very saturated, bright colors that would pop off the shirt and decided to add a bit more interest by breaking up the bullseye. The placement of the buildings and the organic shapes reaching out from behind also implied that the bullseye was a representation of the entire world, re-enforcing the "love is all" tag line.

3. Lebfest '07: This shirt was designed for a mini-event that my friends and I have put together for the last 2 years. The opening ceremonies are held underneath the town's water tower which contains the town's nickname of "The Friendly City". I wanted to play up the "festival" part of Lebfest which drove the general idea behind the design. The geese and gnomes represent the two team names of "Porch Geese" and "Garden Gnomes (which can be found on NUMEROUS porches around the town of Lebanon... lawn ornaments are BIG here).

As a side note, PRN Graphics is a local apparel printing company who I love and trust to get my designs printed. Today I was browsing around their site (because I needed their phone number to call about the Lebfest shirts) and saw that they included my design in their portfolio section. It was surprising to see it on their site. They did a stellar job with the prints and they're really great to work with. If you're in need of a printer, these guys get two thumbs up!