Shirts I NEVER submitted.
By buzz_clik 12 Comments
Design is usually a very iterative process. In the leadup to any finalised piece of work, you can look at all the associated Illustrator files on my machine and see this process in action. Within the same document I'll usually have 5 (frequently more) of what looks like the same design; closer inspection reveals that small changes, tweaks, nips and tucks have been made. I usually like to keep these many tangents in the same document just so I can see the progression of the idea. Plus it's fun to go back to the first, unrefined attempt and chuckle at how crap it can sometimes look.
You might have noticed, but the recent NEVER shirt brief lit a bit of a bonfire under my arse. I know a few people decried the whole idea as something that wouldn't make a good 'gag' shirt (I disagree), but from a design point of view it was great. The word is punchy, it's bold and it has a certain symmetry to the letterforms, both in upper and lower cases.
So here I present some of the discarded doodles that fell by the wayside while I was trying to come up with NEVER shirt designs. I hope you find it an interesting insight into my personal design process. Going left to right, top to bottom...
2. Here's some further refinement that sees the implementation of the coin block. The only real difference to be seen here is the use of more than one colour. I really wasn't thinking when I did this, and then suddenly remembered that the brief asked for a minimum of colours to be used. A few clicks later and the yellow shirt was born!
3. Obviously by this stage, the exclamation point had lodged in my brain (that's probably what's causing this tic I've developed). There are other previous versions of this with the circular part of the punctuation intact, and one without the little bit of sheen on the bomb. See how I can't leave things alone?
4. This was a rough idea that I 'sketched' in Illustrator. I just wanted a fuck off big, chunky, in-yo-face 'NEVER'. This was ultimately taken to even bigger extremes with the second shirt I posted.
5. Another quick sketch. Ugly. Just bloody ugly. Ugly and quickly abandoned. Let's just move on, shall we?
6. I made this one up quite quickly, and it sat there for a while. As it did, other people had the same idea and posted their versions, making this design redundant. Ah, well. I didn't like the clunky way I'd worded my question anyway. The answers that followed it just didn't really seem to fit.
7. Here's an example of the symmetry I mentioned earlier. With this, I also tried to incorporate 'E3' which helped push the mirror-image idea, and the bomb was used to fill in the bit to make the 'r' more like the 'n'. I still kinda like this, but I certainly didn't think it was strong enough for a shirt. It's a little muddled and maybe looks like a (bad) skate brand of some description.
8. My first attempt at a more florid design. Ultimately, it didn't capture what I wanted in the idea, and so I ended up starting again and making my final entry.