NEW STEP + LoliBäh
Translating the energy of streetdance into custom illustrations for clothing and sportswear.
A few years ago, the owner of a streetdance academy, “Escuela de danza D’Elene NEW STEP”, proposed to start a collaboration between the two of us (Loli Bäh is my pseudonym when illustrating). She was searching for cool images to be printed on t-shirts, tops and sweatshirts for her clients and as I absolutely love her dancing style, creativity when doing coreos and philosophy, I agreed 🙂
Project duration:
January 2022 – still running
Tools used:
Design & comunication: AdobeIllustrator, Procreate, Notion and Whatsapp
Appart from a few isolated in person meetings, all our process is beeing defined through whatsapp, that helps us to be very productive and saves us two lots of time.
CONTEXT
Product
Design for Illustrations to be printed on t-shirts, tops and sweatshirts.
Problem
In our first meeting, it came out that the reason she had stopped offering personalized garments to her clients was due to the burden of maintaining a large inventory of sizes (along with the associated financial investment). Alternatively, she found it disappointing for clients to have to wait for a larger order to be completed.
& the goal
That meant, that there were 2 important points to take in consideration for this project:
On one hand the design itself and on the other one, the urgent need of finding a tailor made printing process, to allow her clients continued access to new garments.
GETTING STARTED
To the question if she had already some ideas about what she would like me to design, desired colors, or some images to get myself inspired with, she answered, that she just loves my illustrations, BUT that she would like something a bit more abstract.
Without a defined starting point, I sketched some proposals, specially focused on some photographs I wanted to work with for a long time:
Through the years I’ve learned, that generally it is easier to choose from a few options and change things on that design, than comprehending and deciding based on abstract verbal explanations. Therefore, when presenting new ideas to stakeholders, collaborators or even colleagues, I like to give different options (according to my own personal preferences, obviously) and present them in a visually appealing way.
Starting to define things
She loved the idea of the STRIPES and best liked the ROUNDED VERSION As we agreed to keep it as simple as possible for the start, we defined one dance pose to work with.
Design
Going out from her actual logo and corporative colors, I decided to keep white and black as primary and go into an orange color pallet, too. I started to design different options, based on the definitions we made earlier, and after a bunch of messages, changes, adaptions and laughter 🙂 we finally made it to the FINALS!
As it is a colaboration, we wanted to show the combination of both of our logos together, decided for two similar but different silouettes and went for these color combis.
Final designs in black and white version
USER RESEARCH & choosing a printing method
We did a little Hallway survey among the Academy users, to know how to focus on the commercialization of our designs. Even if the Academy is a small business, there were completly different and opposite ways of thinking, whether referring colors, fabric composition or image placing….
It was clear, that there was no way of satifying everybody.
We needed a completely new and tailor made printing process, to be able to give our clients the whim of a special treatment when ordering their personalized garments.
Therefore, parallel to the design, I needed to find an alternative to the standarized printing process:
Mostly offered one is serigraphy, that gets more and more expensive with each added color and forces you to use always the same frame (image), unless you want each piece to become really expensive.
Also, printing businesses normally ask you for a minimum quantity whether in color, design or size, but we needed something more flexible.
Finally, I found a small and local printing business that was offering a new method called DIGITAL TRANSFER. The price for this service was fixed regardless of the number of colors or designs, and it was specifically for a standard frame size of 1m x 0.50m. We would need to fill that frame, but than each image could be cut out separately and then be attached to any garment we provided:
THIS WAS JUST WHAT WE WERE SEARCHING FOR!!
It gave us the possibility to individualize each piece, and even better: each user would be able to buy the garment of their choice and combine the images however and whereever they wanted to!!
Next, we aimed to standardize the ordering process with TWO MAIN OBJECTIVES in mind:
Simplify the decision-making process for users, allowing them to easily choose images and imagine the specific placement of those on their chosen garment.
To achieve this, we built a small and simple interface in Notion, showing different placing options for each design, and as the Academy doesn’t own a webpage, we gave direct access through a QR code:
Streamline the process for my collaborator to determine the exact positioning of each image on every garment.
Furthermore, our ultimate goal was to ensure that the printing team faces no challenges in understanding the instructions for each individual piece and can seamlessly proceed with the production process.
