JOlson+-+Tshirt

For this T-shirt, seeing as Kiwanis is a community building organization, and this is the Pewaukee Branch of Kiwanis, and the banner of the website is a picture of the lakefront, I want to incorporate some aspect of the lakefront into the design. However, I don't want to just straight up slap an image of the lakefront, simplified, silhouetted, or otherwise, on the shirt for the design, since that seems to have been done too many times already. Those are nice colors though, much summer, such bright.

So Instead I'll just focus on the beach part of the lakefront since the shirt is for the Kiwanis beach party, as well as the sunshine, since the Pewaukee beach is one of the sunniest I've been to. (I don't know if there's just somehow more emphasis on the sun, or just less shade in more places, or what, but it is definitely the sunniest.) In fact, I've decided that, no matter what, I WILL figure out how to incorporate that sun graphic that I saw on the site, some how, some way. Because sun...summer...cute graphics...yeah. Most importantly, the design has to have a beach party //feel.// I mean, if you're handing out shirts at a beach party, they should be beach party shirts, not Christmas sweaters. So it needs bright, sunny, summery colors, kinda like the shirt pictured earlier. I kinda like the retro look I've been experimenting with - it looks summery, and it pretty much epitomizes how the surfing USA song would look in my head if the things I pictured in my head were actually possible to comprehend in a physical manifestation. The retro look I'm talking about is one where everything is sort of imposed on or as simplified shapes, like simple handwritten letters imposed over irregularly shaped boxes. Or really anything that takes geographical shapes, skews them around a bit, and then pastes that at odd angles. Kind of like what they do in Phineas and Ferb all the time. And it's at this point that I remember that this show is about summer and realize how much of my brain is just ripped from cartoons. This style lets you utilize the most space possible and make it look more active and interesting while easily avoiding making the design too busy. It also makes for a cleaner looking design, since it's hard to make perfectly straight lines generated by a computer look necessarily messy. But there shouldn't be any 90 degree angles. If anyone catches me putting 90 degree angles in my design, stop me please. 90 degree angles are BORING. And there should be more line variation than just straight lines, because that's boring too. Like I said, I wanted to focus on the beach, so I'm definitely still going to have curves and waves to depict water, so the 'too many straight lines' thing should be avoided.

And the final thing I have to say about this T-shirt; NO. BLACK. OUTLINES. WHATSOEVER. PERIOD. Black is NOT a summer color, and if we're only allowed 3 colors per design, using black outlines means the rest of the design will have to be filled in with only two colors, which means a less colorful design for the sake of adding lines that squeeze the shapes into their own little holes and chop up the unity with a butcher knife. Shapes without outlines radiate more; they seem to extend out a bit further than their technically non-existant boundaries which makes for a brighter, more unified design. So no black. period.

And that's all I have to say on the matter.