Chair's Design Competition
Designing a T-Shirt
Graphic design is not what I wanted to do with my life, even though I love digital art, I was never really a fan of working with it; Photoshop doesn't like me, Illustrator on the other hand, is alright.
At George Brown, we were required to partake in the Chair's Design Competition against our will, and be judged, against our will. It wasn't a graphic design class but here I am doing graphic design.
At George Brown, we were required to partake in the Chair's Design Competition against our will, and be judged, against our will. It wasn't a graphic design class but here I am doing graphic design.
The task was to create a T-shirt design that would be sold at the 2015 Pan Am games in Toronto this year, all earnings would be used to provide bursaries for students.
Visual Understanding Environment
The Mind Map
Before any actual artwork was to be made, we had to map out our minds to a mind map through something called the "Visuail Understanding Environment" (or Vue), courtesy of Tufts University. We were required to use this little program against our will before any actual work began, this was to make sure that there were no potential hiccups during the designing phase.
The result of a rigorous 4 hours of thinking from the Visual Understanding Environment. They could've picked a better name, maybe it was for the sake of the acronym, Vue.
NOTE: This is not, in any way, an accurate representation of how I think.
The end result for the mind map was to paint a picture in my head somehow of what it was that I'd design. It did help in creating my thumbnails.
The Real Work Begins
Design Phase
After the mind map and a series of thumbnails approved by the professor, I was ready to begin putting together the digitized version on Illustrator
Working in Illustrator, I drew out five different athletes, each in their own sport. I found out that the Pan Am games hosts just about ever sport in existence so I decided to put in a soccer player, a boxer, a runner, golfer, and a biker, from left to right.
I chose to involve a variety of sports to convey the idea that Pan Am hosts more than just the typical basketball, soccer, and basball kind of event.
My first attempt at recreating my thumbnail. I went for a more gesture-esque look and feel since they're athletes and I thought going this route would put more emphasis on their movements.
First revision, I decided to scrap the gestures in favour of more life like looking athletes instead. Previous composition looked too fancy and gave it too much of a joyous vibe. This approach gives it more of a professional athletic feeling and look. The orange is meant to represent energy; I took some inspiration from gatorade.
Also, we have one limitation when designing, we can only use two colours!
For each individual athlete, I also put on them a letter to form P A N A M. I also replaced the soccer player on the left with a horseback rider since Pan Am also hosts horse riding and thought it'd be mroe interesting than an ordinary soccer player.
Second time around, I decided to replace the orange with a light sky blue tint and then bring out the missing limbs of some of the athletes by using black since it was an issue with the last one. I also made Pan Am black as well to help keep things balanced.
The blue tint was meant to give the overall composition a cool feeling of focus since athletes do need focus when their competing, right?
A little more work got me going back to the orange one, but this time, I took out the blue and used just white.
It came out very weird, I didn't know what to make of it. I though using white would make it look cleaner, but it just came out wrong in the end...
Incredibly messy looking. I get this cow vibe from it, most likely because of the patterning.
The End Result
Final Composition
After juggling through a couple failures, I thought of mashing together both the blue and orange variants and add a tint for each athlete to separate them from each other. I also added in 2 more athletes above to give it more force or impact and since Pan Am hosts a variety of different spots and I thought having an archer and a fencer guy would give off the idea that Pan Am is more than just an ordinary sports event, it hosts just about sport out there.
Also added in the CN tower in the center sine it was just begging for it along with "2015" on the center man.
The orange and various blue tints in the background helped to separate the individual athletes very well. Not only did it help keep them separate from one another, it also helped to create distance between them since distant objects tend to go blue-ish in colour. They also compliment each other quite well.
The final print that would be sent in for judging. Below are tags that would be attached.
My four variations exlcuding the initial gesture-esque one since it stood out too much from the rest and really wasn't much of a option.
