The Fantastic Flying Fireman

Brief

Create one single shirt that can be:

  • Sold to the fans

  • Meets the technical specifications for official use

  • Can be worn by family members of Driver without Embarrassment

  • All for under $500 in 2 weeks.

Making it make sense.

What each group needs…

  • The design needs to be unique and interesting. Something “cool” that makes someone want to dish out $40

  • In the work area, it’s required that all crew wear an easily identifiable shirt which links them to their team. Typically, most use shirts that look similar to baseball jerseys

  • This group wants something they can connect with. Something that screams of the client personally rather than professionally

...And how they conflict

  • The fans need something “cool”, which is unneeded by the crews

  • The crews need something basic, which is not what the family wants

  • The family needs something person, which would confuse the fans.

Concept Solution.

In order to achieve all the goals of all parties, a step back was needed. A conventional design wouldn’t satisfy anyone, so something radically different had to be thought up.

Spider Man to the rescue!

Of all things, comic books bit the bill perfectly for inspiration. By focusing on the driver and not the car, it allowed me to flip the conventional Auto-sport shirt idea on its head and try something fresh. By comic-book-ifying his head, it gave it a “cool” appeal for the fans and connected with the family of the client. Then, to bring it back to the driver and crew the photo was surrounded by his cars.

From there it was as simple as adding text, an emblem, and his name across the side… but there is one thing…

AI.

When this shirt was made, the “ai is replacing us” craze was in full swing. So I took a day’s side step to learn how to use it to my advantage. The results were… mixed to say the least.

As you can see here, the output is garbage. Of course we know that, but one thing it did allow for was quick mock ups and a base to reference when remaking the graphics later.

I actually ended up locally hosting the network and training my own model for this. Its a pretty neat tool. But like any tool, its just that. A tool. Was a very valuable learning detour with a happy ending.

Step by Step…

After my little Ai detour, the real work began. Here you can see a few photo’s documenting the process.

There isn’t much to add, other than the fact I reworked every image to fit the style I had going.

Printing

For those that don’t know, printing can be LONG and EXPENSIVE. Remember that last bullet in the brief? Something about $500 and 2 weeks? Yea, that caused a ton of issues. To keep it short, i had to scour the city to not only find a shop willing to take my nonsensical request, but also take it at a fair price.

Luckily for me, Super T-Shirts in Fort Myers saved the day! We managed to print

nearly 100 before they needed to be shipped off to Anderson Indiana, which

was a major success.