TBT: T-Shirt Designs
T-shirts have always been one of my favorite things to design. While they often don’t take long to design, their life cycle is by far the longest of all the things I design. I still see shirts in the wild from time to time that I designed years ago. I remember on my wedding day I saw one of my college internship (terrible) shirt designs being worn by a man in an iHop lobby, several years and several hours away from its source.
Working for colleges has afforded me many opportunities to come up with t-shirt designs, a few of which I will share below. One of my annual projects at Houghton was to design a promotional giveaway shirt for the summer Christian music festivals. Thousands of Christian kids right in Houghton’s demographic congregated to these festivals every summer. It was an easy admissions marketing opportunity: fill out an info card, get a free shirt.
Mockup of a proposed shirt design. Due to another rival school having a similar brand color, this one changed to purple and gray.
One challenge with this project was the abundance of opinions on what the design should be. I wanted something standout and cool with a loose tie to the college. Others wanted a very specific college branded shirt. Somewhere in between is where it usually landed.
Another challenge was authority: who had the final say in the design? I always hoped for a democratic approach since we were all technically one team with one goal. And I hoped that would be achieved through complete trust of the design team to come up with the right design. It’s a nice idea but far from reality. The old “our department is paying for it, so we have the final say” argument was never more present than when I designed for Houghton. I even had one VP insist on polling our shirt designs to a mailing list of thousands of prospective students to “make sure our design hit with the target audience.” At the time I couldn’t believe the gall to not trust your design team. Looking back, I can understand the desire for data backing a decision.
In 2015 I wanted to make a joke of Houghton’s frigid winters by calling it a “Tropical Paradise” on the t-shirt. It was a fun, self-deprecating idea, but it did raise questions. “What if prospective students don’t know it’s a joke?” “What about kids who get the shirt but have no idea where Houghton is?” After much debating, the design made it through with two concessions: 1) We needed to have a snowman on the beach scene. Because you know, it snows a lot at Houghton and 2) The tropical paradise had to be changed to “Dreaming of summer since 1883,” referencing our founding date. These two changes were made, and everyone was mostly happy.
The Houghton “Tropical Paradise” Shirt, complete with snowman on the beach.
A few more of my college t-shirt designs. I wish I kept better samples. There are so many more, and even more unpublished concepts that are lost forever.