Feast your eyes on the tee shirt design for 2013! We are really proud of what we came up with this year, and would love to hear your thoughts.
Since we didn't have any notable events from 2012 of which to create the shirt off of, I decided to go off of the idea of using the outline of Kentucky as a basis for the design. First I used the words Hidden Cove in the negative space of the Kentucky outline. I next just used the Kentucky outline and placed the state of Ohio to mark where Hidden Cove is. I like the idea, but it didn't make for a spectacular shirt.
Next we used designs that incorporated a park ranger or national park emblem of sorts. This was based on a comment from one of Jack's friends that "This place is like a nature preserve!" After that we looked at possibly using some phrases as the focal point like "Happy Camper" and "Cabin Fever." Some of those actually looked pretty good. Unfortunately we were not able to gather unanimous approval from the selection committee, so it was back to the drawing board.
At work one day an idea flashed into my head that we could use the concept of Mt. Rushmore as the tee shirt design. If we were able to replace the presidents with those men involved with creating Hidden Cove, perhaps it could make for an interesting shirt. Its also a heck of a lot easier than carving their likenesses into solid rock. I had Lei send me pictures of Jack, JP, Brian and John at angles. I was able to photoshop their faces into their respective places using some perspective and skew tools. Once they were blended in, I imported into Illustrator and used the live trace feature to create a simple enough image for a screen print. We decided a circular image surrounded by "Hidden Cove National Park" would fit the bill nicely and shazaam, we were nearly there. It was decided the image looked best when it was in a subdued color and we also desired that the image look "worn." So I added some layers on top of the image which replicated a worn out and faded image layer. The resulting product got unanimous approval from the selection committee and is not far off from the image you see before you.
One of the interesting wrinkles that presented itself, was the fact that due to the colors chosen, the female shirts actually required the negative image and the guys shirts required the positive. Turned out to be a little bit of a pain, but I think it was well worth the trouble.
I hope you enjoyed the story of our tee shirt design for 2013. We'd love to read your comments below!
