It’s been too damn long! Here’s a little peek at what I’ve been up to at work lately.

When we design for certain events, such as NCAA National Champions (basketball), we need to get artwork in the hands of our sales-force as quickly as possible so they can get them in front of contending customers who may want to place contingency orders based on what their team’s realistic chances of winning said event are. That’s why a few of these designs do not correspond to the actual winner of the event, such as the Kansas Jayhawks championship design. It turned out to be the UConn Huskie men that cut the nets down recently, but I enjoy designing for Kansas and they were one of the top teams in the nation throughout the year. If the buyer at UConn (be it campus bookstore, off-campus shop or online retailer) likes the design and the salesman is on the ball, the salesman would send us a request to ‘namedrop’ the design for the Huskies; we would change the logo(s) and verbiage to create a new design that UConn could order mere minutes after their team is victorious.

There have been occasions where salesman have gambled on an event, printing two versions of a single championship design, one for each team in the final(s), hoping to sell enough of the eventual winner (which is quite possible because they are one of the first ones to have shirts available, and demand drops precipitously in the days following a win as the fans rabid thirst for new merchandise wears off, meaning the traditional route of ordering, printing and shipping to the customer could take too long to reap the full benefits of the insane demand available shortly following a win) to offset the cost they have to absorb from having a large number of both printed. Where do all the shirts from the losing team go? Usually to charities in  under-privileged nations who could care less about the decoration and are more interested in having a clean, quality shirt on their backs. In that respect it turns out to be a win-win.

My job here at Cotton Exchange is a lot of fun, and I’m very fortunate to be able to combine my love of art and design with my passion for sports, and make a decent living at the same time. I’m grateful everyday. What are your passions? Are you able to make a living doing what you love? Because if your dream is on the back-burner, start taking some baby steps everyday to make it come to fruition; we only get one crack at this life. Thanks for stopping by!

Couple gig posters for my boy Karraguz, a rising star in the world of hip-hop here in Raleigh, NC. This is his first big show and I’m super hype for him. We had a few more subtle colors in the first draft, but I went ahead and reduced it down to black and white so we could print a bunch cheaply and blanket the streets. The second version is printed on red stock to catch a little more attention. The show is in ATL at one of the largest multi-purpose sports and entertainment complexes in the United States, which includes the Georgia Dome and the old Olympic complex from ’96. Big shout to Rayne, best of luck brother.
-created in Adobe Illustrator All work/images copyright © 2010 Lucas Albrecht

Some of the options we offered.

As a designer, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the real-world implementation of your work. From thumbnails and research all the way through roughs and revisions, design can be a grueling process sometimes. The payoff is what keeps us coming back; that moment where everything comes together and you can be relatively satisfied that there are no more additions or subtractions to make. Sometimes this point is never reached; deadlines may force you to deliver work that is not necessarily sub-par, but could certainly use more time and tweaking. (Most designers I’ve come across are notoriously perfectionist, myself included.) I can relate these moments of design bliss to more, less-exciting professions, such as manual labor. I recall one of my first summer jobs as a landscaper, in the August heat sweating my ass off. As rough as it could be, multiple times throughout the day I would look back at a freshly mowed and trimmed yard and get a nice feeling of accomplishment; a job well-done. This tangible payoff appeals to me in life. I like to see results when I work hard. It’s an enjoyable feeling.

The final art sent to Production.

Camp Electric is a summer music camp for young people located near Nashville, TN. They feature a variety of instructors teaching different instruments and giving lessons to the campers. It seems like a pretty sweet place, but I wouldn’t make it because they only feature real instruments. My turntable skills may be under-appreciated I fear. I was stoked when this design was ordered and was able to make it out to the print floor and snag a few samples for my portfolio, as well as that great feeling of accomplishment. People will soon be rocking out with my design on. Sweet.

During the production/printing phase there were a few minor technical issues that came up. Some of my strokes were too light and needed to be thickened up so as not to fill in with ink, or be too small to print. These are issues I always have to be aware of when designing for t-shirts. The constraints are limiting sometimes, but it becomes a fun challenge to push up against the boundaries and see what happens.

These are some works I created for SUNY Cortland at The Cotton Exchange. Just wanted to show a bit of progression from sketch to finished product. My usual process begins with some research. For this particular project I researched some football players in various positions, and then chose a few to draw from. It seems as though actual pencil and paper is disappearing from design work; I think it is crucial to be able to work away from the computer. After the sketch looks about right, Photoshop gets a call to duty. The drawings are scanned on an Epson 1250 at a high resolution so as not to lose any detail, usually 600dpi or so. Then I use my Wacom tablet to clean up the drawing; deleting stray lines and tightening others, being sure to balance thick/thin and dark/light areas. When I’m relatively satisfied with the results I save both a .psd and a .tif. The .psd in case I need to rework, and the .tif for Ai.

After I’m done in Photoshop, it’s time to crank up Illustrator (my favorite program other than Firefox) At this point I have two choices; (1) I can place the .tif, lock it on one layer, and then trace over it with the pen tool on another layer, making for a clean image but tedious work. (2) If I’ve cleaned the image in Ps well and have nice, dark lines, I can play with Illustrator’s LiveTrace feature and let it “vectorize” the image for me. The settings for each image you trace are going to be different; usually I’m after the one closest resembling my cleaned up sketch. This technique keeps the hand-drawn feel of the art, which is why we drew it by hand in the first place, right?

After that, it’s time for color and shading. I personally enjoy bright colors in my work, but for these jobs I am usually constrained by the customers needs which may or may not coincide with mine. For shadows I usually use a darker shade of whatever color the shadow is laying on, using CMYK values. The pathfinder tool is your friend during this stage! After the characters are done it’s time for the verbiage and the final art for the shirt. I have learned a lot about manipulating text at my job that I didn’t learn in design school; it has been great getting on the job experience in this area. Check out the final result below!

These are both up for sale at the SUNY Cortland Bookstore site now!  CortacaJugMerchandise

These are a sample of the work I do for The Cotton Exchange, an apparel manufacturing company located in Wendell, NC. All images copyright © 2009 Lucas Albrecht