A different kind of interview
Today's interview is a little different than the derby winner interviews we've been doing. Today we're talking to MJ from
Compete-tee-tion, the blog about shirt competitions all over the web. Instead of a personal interview, we'll be stepping through what it takes for a designer to create a shirt. MJ's shirt,
"Sore Thumbs", was the very first shirt sold at Shirt.Woot after the launch t-shirt. Let's talk to MJ.
What was your inspiration for this design?
I was dog-sitting and bored. I'd been trying to think of a good drawing project, and happened to look at my Xbox 360. I did a sketch of the controller, and thought it would be neat to do some more.
What did you research for your design?
I started out by drawing all the controllers that I could think of off the top of my head, and then I filled in the gaps by doing some Google searches.
How did you get started? What were your first steps?
I usually start out by doing some loose drawings with Non-Photo Blue colored pencil. I ordered some of those from ebay awhile back and they're pretty cool -- they don't show up much in scans, so it's easy to separate out from the finalized drawing.
After the sketch with blue pencil, I go back in with a pen and trace over the most accurate blue lines. After I looked at the drawings I had on the page, I decided that a strong black and white iconic treatment would look cool, so I got out some tracing paper and drew my black shapes directly over the original drawing. From there, it was all computer work.
I rearranged the controller icons in Photoshop into what I thought was an interesting configuration. Then I plopped it on a shirt and sent it to Woot to see if they were interested. They were, so I redid the icon drawings as a vector file in Illustrator. That made it a lot easier for Woot to set up the print files and ensure that the lines stayed crisp and accurate. Now that Shirt.Woot is fully up and running, though, I usually wait until I have a vector file before I submit anything. It just helps to streamline the process and get things moving more quickly.
How do you decide which colors to use?
Originally, I thought it would be neat to use a silver foil for the icons. But after talking to Woot, we determined that the quality of the foil would probably get destroyed pretty quickly. So we went with more of a dark grey. I'm happy with how that turned out.
What were some of the decisions you made along the way?
The biggest decision I made was when I had my sketches in the icon stage -- that's when I decided to use my images for a t-shirt (up until then I was thinking in terms of computer icons or some kind of collage). So I took my tracing paper scans and started moving the individual controllers around into a bunch of different configurations. The one I liked the most looked a bit like a giant sore thumb to me, so I made a few changes to exaggerate it more in that direction. My goal was to have a shape that resembled a thumb if you knew the name (kind of like an in-joke) but was still kind of a cool looking shape even if that connection was unknown to the viewer.
What do you like about the final result? What do you not like?
I'm very happy with how the shirt turned out. It looks a heck of a lot nicer on a shirt than it did on my computer screen, so that was cool to see. If I had another crack at this design, I'd probably play more with color -- it might have been interesting to have icons that each had two colors, for instance, or maybe to vary color from controller to controller. I'm not sure that any of those options would look better than the current shirt, but it might have been fun to try.
