New Drawing Template for Onsies

We created this template based on the ZEE Spot organic 6-12 month long sleeve onesie.

Long sleeve onesie template

Download the .eps version of this template or for more templates, visit our earlier post: “Product Design Templates“

Using 99Designs to Get A New Logo

Let me start by saying that creating a logo for an organization requires a combination of creative talent, business understanding, communications skill and craftsmanship.  It is reasonable and typical for a company to pay thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a good corporate logo.

With that as a backdrop, we set out to test what you get when you use a competitive design exchange to create a logo for $195.

The purpose of this test is to explore the identity design options available to smaller, informal tribes.

Setup
Our test tribe for this exercise is a 4th grade club soccer team in California.  Their league, LMYA Soccer, selects national team names for each club team,  we are working with Netherlands.  The uniform (jersey and shorts)  will have the league logo, but the rest of the equipment will be decorated with the teams’ logo.

The Netherlands soccer logo looks like this:

Netherlands Soccer Jersey

The tribe is looking to customize:

Duffel Bags
T-shirts
Shorts
Sweatpants
Rubber wristbands
Fat rubber bands for their cleats
Team Banners

The logo and colors should derive from the Netherlands’ identity, but not copy it.

We expect that the logo will be applied as a heat-transfer, direct fabric print, dye-sublimation and embroidery.  To work in all of these processes, it should be bold and clear without small details or small text.  It will have to work in Black and white as well as in full color.

The Competition
We posted the design competition on 99designs.com.  This site is the magnet for considerable criticism from the design community since it erodes the perceived value of proper design and design processes.  We used them nonetheless since many of our tribes have $200 or less to spend on the creation of a new logo.  For them it is 99designs(or equivalent), or clip art.

This is our second time using 99designs.  Our first contest was for a patch design for Tribal iD. In that test, we received 79 entries from 13 designers.

The results of the first contest are available here.

The new, Netherlands Soccer competition kicked off at noon Pacific time on Thursday the 13th and lasts for 7 days.  We generated a design brief using 99desings form and we filled it out as we thought a typical small, informal, tribe member might.

You can see our brief here.

Based on our earlier experience, we expect to start seeing entries within a day or two.

As the entries are submitted we have an opportunity to rate them and provide written feedback to the designers.  Last time we were diligent about providing immediate feedback.  As a result, the designers began to imitate the better rated submissions and the contest lost creativity.  This time we will respond to each designer privately and hold off rating the designs for a few days.

We will post updates over the next few days as submissions come in.

Update 1 (Day 2):

We received 4 design submissions so far.  The first three look good.  Our comments to the designers were that they are strong submissions, but a little severe for a young girls’ team.

Design submissions Day 2

Update Day 3:

Four more designs.  Two of them are iterations (and improvements) on earlier designs.  Two are new.

All four are pretty good, but we still like the golden lion images best.  The more colorful versions look too much like other soccer logos we have seen.  If the contest ended today, we would be pleased with either of the oval lion designs.

Logo Submissions Day 3

Upadate Day 4:

Eight more submissions were uploaded today.  These are significantly different from the earlier designs.  All use the Netherland’s yellow, and all focus on the lion head.  The designs by Jorge have a looser style.  Our preference is still for the earlier designs.

Logos Day 4

Final Entries:

The last two entries come from Gui, one of the earlier entrants. Gui, it turns out, is from Italy.

At the end of our last contest, we felt badly about the designers who did work and did not win, so we offered to make each of them a t-shirt for free.

We were surprised when we ended up sending shirts to Indonesia and Serbia.

Runner Up

The Winner!!

Cut and Sewn / Embroidered Letters

I was looking at t-shirts at a Dianese motorcycle store the other day and I noticed that most of their nicer t-shirts had a high-quality vintage look.  The common feature was that they used various embroidery and cut-letter techniques.

Vintage Triumph T-shirt

As usual, once I noticed this technique, I started seeing it everywhere.

Abercrombie uses this decoration technique on loads of their clothing.

It gives the shirts a weight and texture and has a great retro-appeal.

Abercrombie T-Shirt

So we started doing research into the process of creating shirts like these.

As you would expect it is more involved and more expensive than direct printing and heat transfer, but the steps are pretty straight-forward.

Purchase Cut Letters:
You can buy tackle-twill, felt and other letters on line pre-cut from a variety of companies.  Since college logo stores, teams and cheerleading squads are the major users of cut letters, the readily available fonts include block text and script.

We found a site, jetcuts.com that will cut out any design and they pre-apply a sticky film to the back of the letters so that they are easy to place.

To test the process, we started with a script version of our company name.

We bought 6 copies of the letters and had them cut from orange, slightly shiny tackle-twill.

Since the letters were to be embroidered on the t-shirts we were asked to specify the method of embroidery including satin, zig-zag or bean-stitch.  We chose a bean-stitch, which makes the letters appear as if they are hand-stitched to the garment.  Our hope was that since the bean-stitch leaves a small amount of the twill outside of the stitch, with use and washing the letters will fray a bit, giving the t-shirt a vintage look.

The letters arrived a little more than a week later.  At first we thought there was e a mistake. Instead of 6 copies of the cut letters, there was only on set in the package and the letters were almost 1/8in thick.  On closer inspection, we discovered that the letters were stacked with the adhesive lightly holding them together.

Along with the letters, Jetcut sent a floppy disk with a digital embroidery file.  This was a bit of a problem since we no longer have any computers  with floppy drives, but we bought one that works with the new Macs online for ~$30.

Place the letters
The next step was to place the letters on a few garments and send them out to be sewn.  Since they arrived with a pre-applied sticky film on the back, placing the letters was a snap with a ruler and a heat-press.

Hemp Shirt with Tackle-Twill Letters

We used three different shirts; a really nice kid’s polo from JCrew, a hemp t-shirt from ONNO, and a dark heather cotton Hanes beefy-t.

Embroidery
We took the shirts to AUR embroidery in the Hunter’s Point section of San Francisco, where our friend Kiet is kind enough to help us with small orders.

With Kiet’s help we picked different embroidery thread for each of the three shirts, two of them used a contrasting color and one matched (nearly).

About a week later we picked them up.

Results
We were very pleased with the results.  Everyone’s favorite was the kid’s JCrew polo.  The letters are placed a little low on the torso to avoid the buttons, but the overall look is great.  The adult t-shirts looked good, and I have worn the hemp shirt a couple of times (a pretty good sign considering the number of t-shirts lying around) but there were some issues.

Kids JCrew Shirt with Cut and Sewn Letters

First, the lettering is too small.  From edge to edge the name is about 9in wide.  The shirt is an XXL, and the name looks a little lost in the center of the chest.

Second, the matching color thread on the kids’ shirt looks much better than the contrasting thread that we used on the adult shirts.

Finally, the shiny tackle-twill is not a prefect match for the rough texture of the hemp shirt.  We will see if the shine dies down a bit with washing, but at them moment it doesn’t really fit the look.

Cut and Sew with Contrasting Thread

Follow up:
We still have 3 more sets of the script letters, so we are going to try some different designs.  The first, and most obvious is; we are going to put them on women’s size shirts.  On the smaller shirts, especially on a women’s polo, the size should work better.

Also, we are going to try a zig-zag stitch and a silk stitch.  Kiet says that he can adjust the digital stitch file without going back to jetcut so we will have him do one of each using a matching thread.

Most important, we are going to try a much larger sized letter.  The second batch will probably have to wait for a customer order, since we are focused on testing other things, but I will post the results when they are done.