Sitecritic.net Website Reviews – You Be The Judge

This design idea is based on a t-shirt for a high school yearbook staff. The staff wanted a t-shirt that would allow their yearbook logo displayed and give everyone the ability to sign the t-shirt before it went to print. Due to budgetary constraints, the number of colors had to be limited to make the printing process cheaper. To get some ideas, I asked for some proofs of their pages along with the book cover so I could try to make the t-shirt design match the yearbook design.

I first began with their logo, which was a 3D metallic logo that was to be used on their cover. I scanned this logo and converted it to black and red, which were their school colors. This was done primarily so it would show up on the t-shirt better and the colors were chosen to help the logo stand out on the white t-shirts. Had they chosen dark t-shirts, I would have replaced the black with white and kept the red to keep the primary school color in place.

Around this round logo, I added the text “Mustang Yearbook Staff 2004″ to signify who the t-shirts represented. The final logo looked like this:

Since the staff wanted an area for everyone to write their messages and sign their names, I then had to think of a creative way to organize this. I noticed in their page proofs that they repeated the logo on the top left of their pages for autograph pages. I replicated this by creating a book design on the back and taking the created logo and putting on the top left of one of the pages. This gave an area for the entire staff to sign their names and it resembled the autograph pages of their yearbook.

I printed the back off and took it to the high school for everyone to sign their names with a red sharpie. I did this so I could scan their signatures, put them back into photoshop and change the colors on the signatures to match the red I was using and save on printing costs. In the end, they got a t-shirt personalized for their group, with the ability for each member to show some individuality, which matched their work, and to (hopefully) give them great memories for years to come.