As a designer (not just an artist!), I run into all sorts of different projects. Everything from very simple designs up to extremely complex ones. Sometimes it’s web design, and other times it’s graphic design.
Sometimes, when I’m lucky, it’s graphic art and illustration.
A few years ago, my freelance client asked me to design a t-shirt for the construction company she was working with. I’ve done plenty of t-shirts for her, and plenty of other designs for apparel and other items. But this one was a little more of a challenge.
The construction company was finishing the steelwork on a brand new soccer stadium in northern Denver, and wanted a shirt design that was a little more unique than just the stadium. After some thought, I came up with a design that was just a handful of colors (to match what the print shop could do), but was still graphically interesting.
I started with the logo for the soccer team, and decided that the ball would be a good place to start. As I was constructing it in vector (vs. raster/bitmap… I’ll wait while you look it up), I saw that the framework matched pretty well with the framework of a steel building and went with it:
Once I completed the “steelwork soccer ball”, I added a sky and foreground to it. That hopefully gave it some depth, and a sense of size:
Along with that, it needed a bit more action. Without something going, some sort of action happening in the scene, it’s a bit boring. So I added the crane bringing in one of the panels (that happens to have the client’s required text on it as well). I also added some lines to the ground on either side, not only for style but to give it a sense of scale:
Once that was done, I just needed to add the logos and it was finished. As is often the case, a couple of the logos were received as JPEG files, so I rebuilt them as vectors to work with the print shop:
Here’s the final piece, which if I remember correctly went on about 200 t-shirts:
These are the kinds of design projects I love to work on, since they are so creative. Design and layout is still important, but I get to stretch the creative muscles a bit. I can ask for nothing more than that.
