The design process for the newest tee Get Uncomfortable was a fun one. The phrase seemed to lend itself to a more organic style so rather than using a clean, perfectly-structured font I decided to go analog and experiment with brush lettering. I broke out some old gouache paint and brushes that I had laying around and jumped right in. Let's just say it's much harder than it looks. I am by no means an expert on brush lettering, but it was a fun challenge to try a new technique and push myself with this one.
As you can see below, I went through quite a few sketches to finally arrive at the finished design. I experimented working at different scales with a variety of different brushes. Working larger on the kraft paper allowed me to loosen up a bit and not feel so constricted. I did eventually move back to working smaller, but I found a happy medium of what scale I felt most comfortable with.
After I had the design close to what I wanted, I scanned it, cleaned up some details, and adjusted some small spacing issues. Rather than trace the letters in Illustrator and vectorizing them, I kept everything in Photoshop to preserve the texture and character of the brush strokes. For the final t-shirt print, we used halftones to emulate the texture of the original lettering.
Read more about the meaning behind this design here.
