Just a little tweak…

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018 General

As a design professional, it is always my goal to make everything that comes across my desk look as good as it possibly can. Most times, the constraints of doing commercial art require me to curb my enthusiasm in favor of some sort of profit. In other words, sometimes an “It’s good enough!” approach is the only way to go. The best case scenario is that with a few broad, well-placed strokes, you can create something of substance, or improve upon an existing idea or image. Sometimes it all comes together.

A future client came in with some pretty elementary artwork for their baseball team/sponsor t-shirts. Here it is, obviously created on some online t-shirt site.

While charming in its simplicity, this is exactly the kind of design work that I don’t want coming out of my shop, unless it were purposely lo-fi. It wasn’t. Would it have been easy and profitable to just reproduce something like this? Sure. But from a design point of view, it’s apathetic. There’s a fine line to tread between giving creative input and giving your client what they want, but you never know until you try. After getting some background information, I put together some more dynamic and unique layout alternatives and presented them to the client. There was initial resistance since the designs were so different from the reference images.

After a few days, the designs caught on among the team. Not only were they happy, but their pre-order of shirts doubled in size because everyone apparently loved the design. I could have simply done what was asked of me, but I decided to take a little time to breathe some life into a tired format. Not only did the sale increase, the customer was also very appreciative and happy.

A home run! (I couldn’t resist.)