The challenge this project presented me with was designing apparel. I had never tried designing graphics to for clothing before, and had to find a way to create an appealing design that could be realistically applied to clothing.
The Challenge
Riding Mountain Honey Farms (RMHF) is a small honey business in Manitoba. I was introduced to this project by my aunt who works with them. She had the idea of creating an RMHF hoodie with the business’ logo and the words “What would Beesus do?” on the back.
My role in this project was designing the look of the hoodie. Actually producing them wouldn’t fall under my responsibilities, and would happen at another time.
Design Process
1. Inspiration. To gain a few ideas, looked online at a few different tradesman-style hoodies. I noticed a common design pattern of a company logo on the front left corner, and a larger graphic taking up lots of space on the back.
2. Ideation. The phrase “What would Beesus do?” gave me the idea to create a Beesus character to feature on a hoodie. I sketched out a few ideas, and finally settled on a Beesus design that combined typical depictions of Jesus with a bee.
Overview
Lessons learned
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Client-designer communication strategies
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Apparel design creation
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Turning JPGs (the RMHF logo) into vector graphics
Case Study
This is the final Beesus sketch I moved forward with
I also took the RMHF logo, which features a bee, and turned it into a vector graphic using Adobe Illustrator’s image trace feature.
From there, I found an SVG of a hoodie on Openclipart.org and started experimenting with different placements of the RMHF logo, some bee graphics, and text.
3. Feedback and refinement. I showed some of my design ideas to the owner of RMHF and my aunt, and the two most popular ideas were one featuring Beesus, and one featuring the bee from the RMHF logo.
Acting on feedback I received, I added a crown to the Beesus character, and made some modifications to both hoodie designs.
(Final Beesus Graphic)
4. Finalization. Once I had fixed up the 2 hoodie designs, I created a couple mockups to show how they might look on a real person. The model pictures came from pexels.com
Bee Hoodie
Beesus Hoodie
As a little bonus, I created some Beesus stickers using my college’s large-format vinyl printer.
Lessons Learned
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Communicating with and getting feedback from real clients (as a college student, this was my first big design project that wasn’t school-related)
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Creating apparel designs
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Turning JPGs (the RMHF logo) into vector graphics
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Sticker production
Conclusion
In the end, I was able to successfully create RMHF hoodie designs that the client loved. I even got to produce some Beesus stickers as a little bonus, thanks to my access to Assiniboine College’s Creative CoLab.
Once the hoodies are produced, they’ll help attract new customers by communicating the brand’s values: quality products from a good community.
