2/17/2007

Jersey Design Process

In 2005 I took it upon myself to design a biking jersey for our club at work. For years before that we had talked about how cool it would be to have one but, as always, nobody wants to do the work. I finally decided that if I did it at least I would like it enough to wear it. Being that most of the club riders are engineers, it was probably best in the long run that I stepped up.
The first image in this post is from the concept phase. What it shows is how I played around with the corporate color scheme (green with orange) on the body and sleeves - trying to find a nice balance without being too green. I'm not a big green fan.

In the concept phase I came up with 2 candidates. One design was more aggressive then the other. I figured I would let the group decide on which one to use. The next image is of those 2. Which one would you vote for? As I recall it was a pretty close race but the more conservative design won. Not all that surprising.

Next I sent the design to Voler to be printed. They took my computer file and combined it with their template. The 3rd image is the resulting artwork that was printed. What is very interesting about their process is that this artwork has all the sizes on it. If you look closely you can see the outlines of all the sizes starting with the x-large on the outside, then large, medium, etc... It's a very cleaver way to cut down on the amount of unique printing.

The jersey was a big success and I ended up ordering around 150. When I started out I was worried I wouldn't even get the minimum order of 25 jerseys!

You can see me wearing the jersey here.