Class of 2019 T-Shirt
Apparel Design
DURATION Six months
PROJECT BRIEF To design a t-shirt for the Chico State graduating Class of 2019.
Background
Every year, the Chico State Alumni Association chooses a graphic design student to create a t-shirt for the graduating class. The chosen designer presents three options to the Senior class at the annual ‘Grad Fest’ where the students vote on their favorite design. The winning t-shirt design is then sold at the University Bookstore, as well as the Senior Send-Off Annual Barbecue. The back of the shirt also features the name of every graduating student.
OVERVIEW
The goal of this project was to design the front of a t-shirt, that communicated the feel of Chico State. The audience of the shirt is the entire Senior student body, so the design needed to be something that could resonate with a wide array of people form varying backgrounds.
The project involved multiple steps and versions of the design. Initially, eight options were presented to the Alumni Association, and a commity of students and faculty narrowed the options down to three. Those three designs were refined and then presented to the student body, who voted on the final design.
Research
There was a good deal of research involved with this project. Most of which was done by talking to the student body. I wanted to get a feel for what people thought of when they heard ‘Chico State.’ I wanted the shirt design to represent the student body and please the most amount of people possible. This research phase helped me develop and refine several concepts.
STRATEGY AND DESIGN
PHASE 1
The first phase of this project was creating sketches of the initial ideas concepts produced during the research phase. There were a lot of sketches created at this time, and I often found myself sketching throughout the day, anytime an idea came to me. Fortunately, I had a few weeks to work on this phase before presenting my first drafts to the Alumni Association, so I was able to produce a lot of concepts.
PHASE 2
The next phase involved moving my sketches into Adobe Illustrator. I narrowed down some of my initial sketches into eight vector versions, which I presented to the Alumni Association faculty. After presenting my ideas to the Alumni Association, they were able to narrow down their top three concepts for further development.
PHASE 3
Once the Alumni Association faculty narrowed down their top three concepts, I moved into the third phase. During this phase, I elaborated on and refined the three concepts for further review.
The first option involved trees, as Chico is known as the ‘City of Trees’ and many students feel that trees play a big part of the vibe of Chico State. I played around a lot with this option, trying out different tree designs and different borders.
The next option involved the wildcat statue that was recently installed in front of the Bell Memorial Auditorium. Students are often taking photos in front of it, and it is quickly becoming a staple in the Chico State experience. I took the outline of the statue and filled it with a word collage design. The words used included locations, every department and major, and other words that students felt described Chico State.
The third option was simple, but I felt that many students might prefer the simplicity. Many people I talked to preferred simple designs that were a bit more minimalistic. That inspired this third option, which I felt might please the biggest percentage of students.
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
PHASE 4
Next, the Alumni Association invited additional faculty members and students from the Associated Student Government to vote of their favorite design from the three options. Those three designs were then presented to the Class of 2019 at the annual Grad Fest, where seniors got all the information regarding graduating. Students got to view the design options and vote on their favorite. The winning shirt ended up being the third option. There was a fairly quick turn around between Grad Fest and the Senior Send-Off Barbecue, so the design was quickly sent to the printer, and several hundred shirts were ordered.
PHASE 2
From there, I moved into the code, using D3, which allowed me to create small animations within the visualization. During this phase, I worked a lot on ensuring that there was user feedback when a user clicked, hovered, or moused-out of an element. I wanted all of that to be solid and work without any glitches, therefore, it ended up being one of my main focuses.
The central part of this project was the data visualization of the representation of women in politics. My strategy for displaying this data was to use bars that represented the percentage of women and men represented. The bars were in scale to one another, to show how significant a difference between men and women there were in many of the categories. When a user hovers over one of the bars, it displays the percentage, as well as some additional information.
PHASE 3
During the final phase, I worked on adding all the additional items, which was virtually everything except the data visualization. This included a map, which showed users which countries have and haven’t had a female leader.
Another element was a video. I have always loved the film Missrepresentation. I have watched it many times, and I felt that it did an excellent job of explaining why this topic interests me, and why I find it to be so important. I had experience adding audio, but I had never added a video clip. It ended up requiring a lot of trial and error, but eventually, the video worked perfectly.
CHALLENGES
The primary challenge when designing this shirt was designing something that would please everyone. Everyone has different preferences, but I really wanted to create something that the majority of people would enjoy wearing. Even just presenting the drafts from the first phases to a large group of people proved to be difficult because everyone had their own preferences and not everyone agreed.
EFFECTIVENESS
I believe that this ended up being a very successful project. The third option won by a landslide, so it is clear that it pleased the greatest percentage of people. The shirt sold very well at Senior Send-Off, and the Student Bookstore. The design was even used for the front of the Commencement booklet at the 2019 graduation.