T-SHIRT DESIGNS FOR TEEE CLUB
Client Project
2023
Software:
Adobe Illustrator
Teee Club is a subscription service that provides quality t-shirts with stylish, screen printed illustrations for their subscribers every month and later available on their online store. During my internship and later as a freelancer working with creative agency MacWell, I had the opportunity of designing a few of their products as MacWell is their trusted companion in creating these striking and eye-catching prints.
Their shirts at the time had three different themes — Love & Hate, Roses & Bones and Nordborn — with also special shirts available every now and then. Inspired by the recurring themes, I had creative freedom in creating prints that capture their essence and attitude.
I found making of the illustrations very pleasant for a number of reasons. Having done a lot vector based illustrations I had the necessary technical skills, in addition to which the illustrations of Teee Club are close to my personal style and motifs — therefore the process felt quite organic and fairly effortless.
Preparing the designs for print required precision and patience as they were eventually screen printed on the back of the shirts. Therefore each color had to be separated on their own designated layer, as only one color could be printed at a time and each color needed its own screen. As I tend to rely significantly on multiple layers (instead of e.g. line art) while creating my vector graphics, the last stage in prepress consisted of cleaning the file while separating the colors on two layers. The more illustrations I designed, the more I began to take the separation process into consideration early on in order to be more efficient.
Each shirt of Teee Club is its own individual as the illustrations vary in a wide range from skeletons to runes and human hearts eaten with chopsticks like sushi.
Unlike the rest, the design I made for April ‘23 went through multiple changes until I felt I had succeeded in what I was hoping to achieve. The illustration consists of a heart and two hands positioned in a way that is highly spiritual — in earlier versions a white frame and an abstract stroke surrounding the heart were included, but I decided to remove them as I wasn’t satisfied with the design. I had initially wanted to use runes in another illustration I had scrapped early on, and I was encouraged to try incorporating them into the new illustration instead. Thus the abstract stroke became a sash with adjectives describing various character traits — written in runes. This worked out perfectly as I found the change was just what the illustration had needed.
For the design of May ‘23 I kept the same color palette but aimed for something more sophisticated, ending up with an illustration of a thorned rose framed by a sharp, upside-down triangle.
In the shirt for July ‘23 I wanted to bring out a more sensitive side of Teee Club in contrast to their more edgy, masculine and rebellious attitude more commonly seen in their products. I was heavily inspired by the Icelandic artist Björk — and her record Homogenic, which I was listening to as I worked on the illustration — and an image I had seen online of a swan giving a hug for a man. The illustration depicts an aggressively erupting volcano and a fragile man that may appear to be an angel at first glance, but is instead hugged by a swan — whether the swan is just comforting the man as he is surrounded by lava or attempting to lift him to flight is open for interpretation.
The primary colors of Teee Club designs are black and white, in addition to which each design features an accent color. Red and orange might be the most often used colors which I had also used in my designs up until I decided to do something different for the most recent design for November ‘23. As the design had to be made on short notice, I wanted to aim for something simple and fresh in terms of both color palette and subject matter. Illustrating a sprouting avocado seed, I took inspiration from my personal life as I have been growing a couple of avocado trees for the last few years.
