T-Shirt Design & Logo Roundup - Summer 2017

With the oppressive heat in full swing, it's time to break out your favorite tees. Apparel is not something of which I do an enormous amount, but it's always a good time. Here are a few of my favorites from the past several weeks/months/years.

Barley's Craft Pizza & Beer
Greenville, SC

King's Sandwich Shop
Durham, NC

Key West Pub Crawl 2015
Funky Buddha Brewery
Oakland Park, Florida

Oconee Brewing Co.
Greensboro, Georgia

Euro-Awesome 2015
Personal Project

"Courage!"
Santa Maria Brewing Co.
Santa Maria, California

Hoke Family Reunion 2017
Cleveland, Ohio

King's Sandwich Shop
Durham, NC

Maple Bacon Coffee Porter Festival
Funky Buddha Brewery
Oakland Park, Florida

Iron Triangle Brewing Co.
Los Angeles, California

Silver Harbor Brewing Co.
Saint Joseph, Michigan

"Ales & Lagers"
Santa Maria Brewing Co.
Santa Maria, California

Funky Buddha, Barley's, Iron Triangle, Oconne, and Silver Harbor. were all done while I was at The Brandit, but not all of these shirts were ever produced. Sometimes it's fun to see what might have been.

SunUp Brewing Cans on The Dieline

Elizabeth Freeman, contributor to The Dieline, posted The Brandit's packaging design for SunUp Brewing Company's canned products on TheDieline.com. I'm really pumped about this, as I art directed this project from day one, designed the logo, and worked with the illustrator, Mads Berg, to develop these cans.

VIEW THE LINK

The press-check process for these products was especially intense. We checked 5 products in a single day, which is quite a challenge, especially when there are only 2 shared colors across all 5 cans. That means there are 22 unique colors to check, way more than one would normally attempt for a single day of press-checking. To make this happen, I went in the day early and hand-sorted through thousands of ink-on-aluminum swatches to pick what would work best together ahead of time. I also picked backups, in case they looked a bit different when covering the can.

Funky Buddha's Hop Gun IPA Label Featured on BeerLabelsInMotion

The animation below was not made by me: it was made by the label animators over at Beer Labels in Motion. If you can't see the live animation go to this link.

Holy... we're... ... We're speechless @beerlabelsinmotion, this is honestly one of the coolest things we've ever seen. Thank you for this awesome tribute and cheers for a million years! #GetFunky #beerstagram #FloridaBeer #Beerlabelsinmotion #amazing #Ifeeltheneed #theneedforspeed

See this Instagram video by @funkybuddhabrew * 786 likes

It looks really fantastic, and I'm very excited that a design on which I worked showed up on this blog. You can see more of Beer Labels In Motion's work here, and follow them here. The original design you can see below, and to view more Funky Buddha work, visit their page in the portfolio.

Catch the Moment: Logo Design Process

Catch the Moment is an "Event Photo Entertainment" service, specializing in green screen video booths at large corporate events. As a client of NFIDM, I began working on the logo portion of their rebrand. This post, however, is not about the full identity development. On the whole, strategy and concept decisions are more important to brand development than creative execution, but I wanted to show a step-by-step artistic review of my execution process as well. Here are the visual steps I used to create a "Catch the Moment" logo concept, which is pretty indicative of my normal logo design process.

Note: Catch the Moment did not choose this direction for their final logo. You can see the artwork they selected by visiting their website. Zaib Malik designed the final mark; I have referenced him before in this post.

92% (or so) of the time I will begin by sketching with pen on paper. If I'm in a rush, I sometimes don't start on paper, but then I just end up wasting time on the computer for a few hours, and go back to paper anyway, wishing I had just started there. Maybe I should have learned my lesson by know. Anyway, here are some intial sketches.

Initial Sketches

After a few concepts, I settled on an old video camera as the image, and wanted to utilize a vintage Hollywood style.

Defining specific lines and forms is not as important to me in the sketching phase as figuring out how the whole image will work together. Composition, as well as general visual style, is really what I want to figure out while I'm in the sketching phase. This particular logo was really well described in the sketch phase, even more detailed than usual, so the next steps were relatively quick.

Shape out the Area

Note: Notice how in this phase I dropped the "button" that was on the left hand side of the circle. Often I will loose superfluous elements when going from sketch phase to illustration, but in this case I might have just forgotten about it. Oh well.

Do the lineart

Balance Elements / Text

Experiment with Colors

If I have a difficult time picking a color scheme, sometimes I will reduce the illustration to a greyscale version just to see where I want my darkest and lightest values. After I get this to work the way I like, I can easily explore schemes with the appropriate lightness and darkness.

Greyscale Version

Final Colors

All in all I am quite happy with how the final logo turned out. The colors and illustration style work together to create a fun, vintage tone. Although this particular brand would likely only exist online or in digital media, I felt compelled to create a couple simplified permutations of the logo in case of unexpected black and white printing from a desktop printer or similar situation.

Greyscale Variant

Single Color