Ice Bowl Shirts
Illustrated and Designed from Scratch. There where 2 challenging parts to this project: one, working with only 3 colors (white, black and blue) and, two, coming up with original illustrations. The Ice Bowl had previously used online stores, but had used pretty much all the clip art out there in cyber world. Since I would rather create something original, we where given the okay to go ahead with custom illustration.
First, I tackled the logo, hand drawing the letters to make them look like carved “ice”. Scanned it, and redrew it in Adobe Illustrator. I knew I wanted to use the main element of the logo for both tournaments, to tie them together. I wanted this, as the backs of the shirts would be different. The other element keeping both shirts together were the ink colors and shirt color (Screaming Safety Yellow… put a bunch of kids together in these shirts and I swear you get welders flash, burning up the retina’s!!!)

The illustrations I drew from some pictures I had of lacrosse. Since the game is different for boys and girls, each design represents the differences. The boys features a one on one goal attempt, with a player horizontal, the ball in the air while the goalie tries to fend it off. I originally was going to go with a bone crushing hit of 2 players fighting for a ball, but felt that the graphics and layouts promoting North vs South Handled the physcial aspect of the game, while the player illustration better represented “Whatever it takes” The Girls Shirts has an example of how girl lacrosse players start after each goal, moments after the ball is thrown up. “You gotta want It!” is the catch phrase for the girls tournament. Since there is not a lot of contact in the girls side of lacrosse, this graphic best illustrates a key component to scoring, as the player who gets the ball, tends to have the advantage of scoring.
Each and every element of the design was made as a vector illustration (lines and fills instead of dots) in Adobe Illustrator. I only worked in spot colors, so from the start, I knew what was going to be what color or shade of that color.
Now these graphics where finished and approved about 3-4 weeks prior to the tournament. We also converted the graphics to web ready files, making a html email so that the graphics where in the body of an email. Email was designed by us to get teams/players to pre buy the shirts. We also used these web ready graphics on our site, setting up an online ordering system.
I though we where on easy street when it came time for production. Man, was I wrong. The boy’s shirts were printed first, then front of the girls was done, but when we started printed the back, we realized that the illustration was output so wrong as to be unfixable. I originally was going for a muddy look on the illustration. That didn’t work out, at all. So on a Thursday night, the night before the shirts were due, I redrew the entire illustration, made 3 new screens, left about 11:30 pm, got up early and the backs first thing in morning.still finishing on time.

One thing we try to do is leave enough time to handle the bumps in a job. I am kinda torn about talking about a mistake. Normally, I just want our customers to know that the job is done right and on time, leaving any difficulties out of the conversation. Problems tend to come across in a negative fashion, but in this rare instance, I will try to explain how we did the entire project and delivered it on time.