Last year, Bart Stevens (the Main Dude that made both the 2008 and 2009 shows such successes) asked me to design a t-shirt for the first-ever event, which would include a logo design as well as making the art something that could be used on flyers, banners, and more.
First order of business was to develop a logo to go along with the catchy name. Bart and the city needed to get some flyers out and a rudimentary web site in place asap, so after a few sketches...
we settled on this version.
The 2008 t-shirt art was built as a black-and-white and placed onto flyers before I even added the final color.
When it came time to plan the 2009 show, we already had the logo and name in-place as a basic brand. Bart specified he wanted to keep the logo going, but have new illustrations of cars for the flyers & shirts. At the 2008 show, Bart had gathered a few vintage race cars as a sort of treat for the participants, but it turned out that this group became one of the headline attractions of the event. We made sure to put a race car on the shirt this year, along with a cool old hot rod.
After I put together a few sketches, Bart and I were really liking the dynamics of a bird’s eye view of the two cars.
Like last year, black & white came first, then we played around with color, settling on this design on a Navy shirt. (Marcy from Living in Skin also printed some shirts in other color combinations to be sold at the event.)
Along with the car illustrations, Bart approached me with the idea of putting together a set of trading cards showing off a few cars that had attended last year’s event. These would be printed and placed in the goodie bags given to each participant car owner at this year’s show.
Bart had a pretty solid concept in mind for the layout of the cards, keeping it looking like something vintage. The cards were to be printed on an ivory-toned paper stock in black ink only. The big challenge, though, was to decide what kind of packaging to use. We looked at paper bands to wrap around the cars, ply bags, and several kinds of clear and cardboard boxes. We settled on these tins.
For me, it was an interesting challenge to work with the photography I was given. A couple of the photos came from pro (or talented amateur) photogs, so those were cake. I wanted to make the photos maintain the vintage vibe that we were trying to do with the paper and printing, but that’s not so easy when you’re dealing with a low-resolution photo from a point-and-shoot. Many digital cameras have trouble rendering detail in highlight areas, and it gives photos a “digital” look. Some images required some “doctoring” but I’m pretty pleased with the end results.
Word is that the recipients of the trading cards really liked them, and Bart and I sure hope they can be appreciated by the participants as much as we appreciated their participation in the event.
One other element of the visuals I had the honor of helping with was a coloring book to give to kids that showed up at the event.
(Photo by Bart Stevens)
The show organizers set up a booth to hold a coloring contest for the kids, and the books were a real hit. It’s really humbling to be included with these very talented artists:
Neal DeWitt
Mark Ervin
Flip
Jamie Geesling
A.J. Tony Groves
Robert Hamilton
Todd Jones
Fred Lammers
Chad Lampert
Jeff Norwell
Gabe Pacheco
Ger Peters
Joe Sander
Del Swanson
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