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February 4, 2009
Winterblast 2009 T-Shirt Design
I've just received a box of freshly printed t-shirts I've designed for Winterblast, our church youth group's yearly winter retreat. As with the 2008 t-shirt design, I'd like to share a little more about the design process along with imagery of the final design.
Maintaining the Winterblast Identity
Since 2007, I've been working with a few constant specifications when designing the Winterblast t-shirt — a solid color, long sleeve shirt, white ink
on the front only and a stylized wintertime animal in the artwork.
For the 2007 design I created a snow monster with two broom ball sticks on a navy shirt to start this series. In 2008, I chose a polar bear with a winter hat and sunglasses on a forest green shirt.
For 2009 I selected a penguin on a snowboard as the cold-weather animal to stylize for the shirt design.
Sketching the Snowboarding Penguin
With that general direction in mind, and the word FOLLOW as the 2009 theme, I began sketching ideas of penguins on snowboards, flipping over the typography:
Tom the youth pastor wanted simplify the FOLLOW type so the double LLs wouldn't tuck together, and we both agreed that having the FOLLOW type tilting downhill (rather than uphill) with the penguin grabbing air over the type worked best.
Color Mockup
Next, I prepared a color mockup for Tom in Adobe Illustrator, to show how the design would appear on an indigo blue long-sleeved t-shirt:
The font used for FOLLOW was based on Oxide Solid Light, with the strokes of the letters bolded manually, a customized W to match the style I wanted to see, and a custom explanation point added to round out the typographic details.
Tom liked this look and shirt color, so I sent shirt sizes and final artwork to MJM Screen Print & Embroidery Studio in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin for final printing.
Finished Design
The final, finished design turned out great, and I especially love the indigo blue shirt color, which fits in well compared to the shirts from 2007 and 2008:
Once again, the shirts turned out well, thanks to the great work by MJM on printing. I'm looking forward to handing these out to our students at Winterblast this weekend.
February 4, 2009 1:30 PM | T-Shirts | 
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Rohdesign is the site of designer Mike Rohde, who writes about design, sketching, writing, mobile computing, technology, travel, cycling, books, music and more.
