Pow wows T shirt

The Briefing

I chose to visit 99 designs, a website known for generally cheap and lousy design 'competitions' so that I have had experience using one of these websites.

After browsing through a couple of contests which stood out to me, I chose to attempt to create a Native American Pow Wow t shirt. I have had experience mocking up t shirt designs before so I felt that this project could be undertaken quite easily for me.

Background information:

To be used on Men Women, so A unisex t shirt must be designed therefor the design must be to masculine or feminine.

Color preferences Native American - I must research typical Native American colours as inspiration for this t shirt design.

These are lifestyle brands. Their designs take pieces of that lifestyle and use them in creative ways. Our goal is to create a set of merchandise for our visitors that will reflect the Native American Pow Wow life. We want a design that is catchy. It can be vibrant, modern, vintage, etc. Just use elements from Native American life to create an amazing design.

The Research

"Pow Wows are the Native American people's way of meeting together, to join in dancing, singing, visiting, renewing old friendships, and making new ones. This is a time method to renew Native American culture and preserve the rich heritage of American Indians."

The publishers of this contest posted various pictures of inspiration to give the designer an example of what the final outcome should look like. They noted these images as Style/Theme ideas:

The colours and the implements used by the characters in the images were something that massively grabbed my attention and I felt were unisex and were images which represented South American culture well in my mind. The Beads in the top image were something I personally considered to be rather feminine so for this reason I was rather reserved in using this image in my t shirt design.

I viewed the photographs that Powwows provided of their dance events to get a feel of the atmosphere of their group, this also gave me a great indication to the colours used in their vibrant and eccentric outfits.

Pow wows also suggested some other companies which revolve around south American culture and create t shirt prints, the difference between these and what Powwows as a company were doing was that Pow wows was a gathering of traditional south american dancers whom specialised in their bright coloured vivid imagery and iconography. The vectors on these t shirts denotes the wrong message and is trying to represent the more contemporary south american culture rather that the traditional one.

I kept in mind the style which was accepted by the modern youthful people of this country, but stuck to my original research of the colours and traditional aspects of their ancestor's cultures.

Colour gathering

Using the images suggested by Powwows, I used the colour grabbing tool to isolate the specific vibrant colours from the garments and art works create by these South American people. This would be the best way to get those colours into my digital world preparing to work with these for future reference.

Acting as a mood board of sorts, the gradient pattern jumps out to the viewer with the amount of colour used.

Using different types of gradient methods (On photoshop) I applied this colour gradient to 12 t shirts in ways that each varied from one and another.

In instances where the colour spanned from a certain spot on the t shirt, I chose for the colour to come from where the wearer's heart would be, as a concept for 'Powwows is in your heart', or relating to the culture of dancing always being in their heart and relating to these ancestors.

I didn't intend to submit these as designs for the competition, but these could be used as a background for the t shirts or work alongside vectors.

Final designs

From the research I gathered and the experiments I had done so far I moved onto combining the photographs of the events 'Powwows' run and the colours I had discovered in my research.

I made a choice to use the image of children on the t shirts rather than specifically men or women due to the fact that children represent more of a unisex and universal role as part of this dance society, in adverse to solely putting adult men or women on the t shirts.

Using photoshops cutout methods, I removed the background of the children dancing at the events and imposed more icons which represented traditional American Indian culture.

Using the colours researched from the photographs of South American/ American Indian cultures, I created a painted pattern which I then went on to overlay over my cut out images of the photographs from earlier.

This is the final design which I created.

Bright

Vivid

Exciting

Eye catching

I Imposed the photograph design onto a t shirt and then onto a man wearing the t shirt to put this design into context. At this stage I decided the t shirt needed to represent the dance company more so I chose to put Pow wow's logo onto the design.