Case Study: tshirt design for a crypto tax company
A crypto tax company asked me to redesign their company t-shirt. Their current version was a simple, black, one sided t-shirt with the company name in Arial written across it.
They wanted me to create a more artistic and abstract design which was contemporary and would make them recognisable as a team at the upcoming crypto conference they planned to attend in the next 2 weeks. I proposed first to them to completely redesign their corporate identity & branding and incorporate this into the t-shirt to create a long-term design as they mentioned they where not happy with their current Logo & visual identity and didn’t want to use it for the new t-shirts. The company was facing a time constraint of 2 weeks until an upcoming conference they said they wanted to use the t-shirts at and that they wanted to take more time for creating a new corporate identity & branding.
Therefore, I moved away from an approach of creating a company t-shirt that reflected their logo and visual identity and started with Designs that where more abstract and artistic. The founders of the company told me that they didn’t have any requirements other then there being a Design for the front and the back of the t-shirt and possibly incorporation of different cryptocurrencies.
I was required to deliver my final result within two weeks including getting the t-shirts printed and finding a suitable supplier that would deliver within those 2 weeks. After brainstorming and collecting t-shirt Design styles which inspired me I created different styles to provide enough options for choice. My main inspiration for the Design which was selected by the company was the Album Cover from Ross from Friends Outsiders (click).
Before sharing them with the company I conducted a User survey asking for User feedback on my Designs. I received 20 User responses overall with positive feedback, however one User replied that it seemed different to what they would expect from a company t-shirt and more like graphic Design since it didn’t reflect any corporate identity.
My initial proposal where 8 different Designs:
In the next step, I presented my Designs to the company and we had a meeting with all employees discussing which Design they preferred.
The Founders and the team selected their two favorites. Together with the team we concluded that the final Design should be on a black t-shirt, containing the font I picked “La Distorsionada” with the company name Pekuna in the front and an inverted version of Design F. without the lettering in the back. Other proposals I made where to include the website link in the back of the t-shirts and the team proposed to include Social Links but the founders decided against this.
I created several versions of the final, inverted Design that was selected in order to find the right placement of the elements after removing the text from the Design.
After presenting my solution to the company, my idea was accepted and I was told to go ahead with finding a supplier. The Design took me about one week of work.
I received very positive feedback from the Founders, both said that their requirements had been fulfilled and their expectations met. I found different local suppliers which unfortunately did not provide fast shipping options, so I decided to move forward with Spreadshirt. Upon receiving the t-shirts I noticed that the print was not pixelated and exactly as required but it would have been necessary to receive a sample first and test different suppliers with more time as the print on the t-shirts delivered by Spreadshirt were slightly sticky. I concluded that the given time constraints were not ideal for finding the best possible quality supplier. This was my first t-shirt Design and the company made them their official t-shirts requiring every employee to wear them throughout the conference.
