We have not had any collaborative assignments. However, everyone in the Communications and Marketing department did have to create T-shirt mockups and designs for the organization. Prior to this we each have had our own individual assignments. I think it was interesting to assign us all the same thing to see what everyone created for the shirts. I’m not sure if these will actually be made into shirts or not but nonetheless they were fun to design.

I am not very creative when it comes to clothing designs and pushed myself to do something different for the t-shirts. I figured everyone was going to use the organization’s logo on the designs, which I also did, but made sure to keep it interesting and not just a logo on a shirt. I didn’t want anything to be too trendy, the organization is made up of a number of people of different ages and wanted something everyone can wear. By this I mean I didn’t put anything on the sleeve or went too crazy with the colors or pattern because if this is a shirt that everyone has to wear, you want people to actually want to wear it. So the balance of creating a professional and age appropriate t-shirt that wasn’t boring was kind of a challenge. Designing clothes is not my forte but I tried my best anyways. For one design I created I modeled it after a baseball tee, which used one of their colors from the company. It was the dark blue on the sleeves and the collar and the logo was small and off to the side. The second design was a colorblock t-shirt. I wanted to be more creative than just putting a logo on a shirt and so I decided to use the colors of the company to create colorblocking. So the dark blue was the torso of the shirt, the cyan was on the left sleeve, the pink on the right sleeve, and the green as the collar of the shirt. The logo contains a lot of colors so I decided to use all of them in one shirt without any logos or text. For the final design I did another colorblock shirt. This time the torso was white, the left sleeve pink, the right sleeve cyan and the collar yellow. I put the logo on the front and the year the org was established underneath.

I thought those were pretty good but decided to do more simple ones. I created mockups on photoshop by downloading some from freepik, which is really helpful and has great mockups. For those designs I kept it very simple because I didn’t know how to manipulate the mockups very well. All the t-shirt designs are white and all except one have a yellow collar. One design just has the logo on the front, the other has it in the corner, and the last one has information on the back of the shirt like a phone number and the name of the org.

I thought this sort of project was successful because I was able to try and learn something new. I’ve never done any clothing mockups before and it was exciting to see everyone else’s designs. I’m not sure if these will be made into actual t-shirts though because we are only the designers and in my experience don’t see where the things we design go or where they exist. I’m still wondering if the magazine article I did was actually printed or not. I think for now it might still be a digital magazine. Anyways, I thought it was an interesting week and look forward to the next assignment.