As we get closer and closer to October 15th (Karmaloop's KAZBAY Party in SF), we thought it'd be nice to update the readers with a detailed image of what the collaboration t-shirt we made looks like in its full glory, then speak a little about the process of creating and designing it.
Coming into this project, we knew that there were more than 13 brands who would be attending the party; these brands are all separate entities, but will be coming together with the same intentions: to promote brand awareness, to network, and to have a wonderful night.
It'll be a party you shouldn't sleep on.
Conception: When we first started the project, NASCAR and the massive amounts of ads that are applied to a each car came to mind, since we would be working with over 13 logos in the design; thinking of NASCAR made sense at the start.
The thought of the amounts of logos to put on a t-shirt design AND make it appealing was overwhelming. Maybe we'd have to change up our idea of how to go about this design.
We decided that NASCAR frame of mind for the design wasn't going to be attractive or appealing to pop culture, and definitely not something popular to used by the urban heads in the KAZBAH store. The question was now, "what could we use?" What popular product, vehicle, or character would suffice for this job? We dug back into our youth and the idea of Transformers came to mind - then Voltron. Voltron is a classic figure that most of these brands could gravitate towards.
Quickly after vectorization, we realized that trying to fit the Voltron figurine on a t-shirt and have enough room to fit 13 plus logos on it as well would be quite difficult, especially if we want each and every logo to be clear. That idea was tossed.
Then it came to me! Why not mix these logos into a nice sleeved tattoo design, but with a twist. We would use traditional japanese tattoo sleeve imagery, but mix in images that all these brands could relate to, such as things they sell; we wanted to include products like hats, shoes, ect.
The following are sketches, images and progress jpegs.
Definitely not my best work, but Janine seemed happy. For Facebook fan #54, we promised him an iPod Touch sketch, since sketches are better than the real thing anyways. And this time Anh was readily available to put in work:
