wear yourself out
programs used : photoshop. illustrator.
time frame: 3-4 months
I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into a store searching for something to buy and felt “Jesus. I could do better than this.” Having staples in your closet is undestandable, but all of us want something that showcases our personality a bit. Something unique that can be a conversation piece. Or a conversation starter. When I was younger, trying to find unique t-shirts was a favorite past time of mine until hipsters and Mac Miller made it impossible to continue doing so without feeling I needed to punch myself in the face. Then I moved onto using Illustrator and Photoshop to make my own t-shirts. Not bad. My confidence was boosted when I began selling some of those designs to places like Diplomacy. I figured that if they were making money off of my designs they couldn’t be that crap. At minimum they had to be consumer grade crap. Armed with that revelation I decided to try my hand at doing more of my own designs. But I didn’t want to do something I had already done. I wanted to try my hand at something harder that was still in the realm of what I had accomplished in the past. At least that’s what I thought.
seed. create. iterate.
These videos are an “idealized” vision of the actual creative process. Best believe I broke my skull and my ass at various times trying to discover the look I was going for. My process is exactly as stated. Seed, create, iterate. The “seeding” is mood boarding and trying to absorb the style of the visual language for what I want to create, before I try to marry that with what’s in my head. A simplier way to think of it is, if you want to make a good pizza, you have to eat a lot pizza and figure out what you feel is and isn’t good. My initial idea behind the denim jackets was that I didn’t just want to design a piece of clothing that was cool and you wore once in awhile. I wanted to create something that was your favorite article of clothing. Something you would default to at any opportunity. A security blanket. A companion. A spirit animal.
I think it’s important for me to point out that while I am Puerto Rican, and while I drew on some elements of Taìno culture for this design, I also drew from a number of other cultures. Cherokee, Mayan, and Aztec just to name a few. Being Puerto Rican doesn’t give me some card that allows me to pick through cultures at will, being a designer does. Those cultures symbols were part of the inspiration for this, and I’ve tried to honor some of their meaning within this composition, such as the chest symbol which is inspired by "sun” symbols. Or the triple triangles used as feathers that are somewhat derived from symbols for “wind” or “sky”. That’s the key though; “somewhat”. None of these symbols are 1:1 coorelations for their originals because I wasn’t going for that, I just was trying to mesh and invoke those elements. That might offend some people, and if you’re one of these people that is your prerogative. You are allowed to be offended. I’m not trying to be dismissive. I’m just saying this jacket and design isn’t for you. I don’t want to go into a soliloquy here about my thoughts on cultural symbols, appropriation and what not, mostly because this is a case study and not a blog post. Suffice to say, I’m of the mind that designers and artists should be allowed and encouraged to draw inspiration from things outside of their own cultures. Hell, I would argue that part of their job is to act as a bridge between cultures and their creations can be a catalyst to discuss and explore aspects of other cultures. This isn’t my ode to “X” native culture’s Thunderbird denim jacket. It is my personal design for what I would want a Thunderbird denim jacket to look like.
DTG (Direct To Garment) is the typical way that you get a design printed onto an article of clothing, and I had become comfortable with the procedure after designing many a t-shirt. At the outset of brainstorming this project I wanted to create a leather jacket but quickly backed out when I took into account the price and also the fact that DTG printing on leather requires a special machine. So I went with denim thinking this would skirt the issue. The problem was that unless I wanted to do a minimum run of 10k and go into the denim jacket business with both butt cheeks, I couldn’t find a DTG printer in all of Dallas that would do a “small” run of denim. Most of them had no idea how to do it, and the ones that could, either didn’t want to do something as complicated as my design or didn’t believe it was possible to get the size I wanted (a 13.5” x 13.5” print). It took a lot of scouring before I found one small shop primarily servicing a high school’s varsity team that had no issue taking the job. Time to print.
We’ve got wardrobe. It’s time for me to shoot.
Map some ideas out.
The sales card.
The main lesson I took away from this, that I was already aware of but I guess had begun taking for granted, was that finding the right printer is like finding the right dance partner for a designer. You can have a concept in your head, but it is clean and undisturbed from the reality of the medium you’re trying to contain it within. Printers bring that reality. Whether it’s fabric or paper stock or anything else, the material you choose for your designs inherently changes them. They have to change to become real and not just be an idea in your head. And that makes you appreciate them all the more when they come out better than what you imagined. Have I sold a lot of these? No. But I got to create something I really do love and default to. I’m not going to stop making more either.
