Publish365 027: Looks Easier Than It Is
One of the things I'm enjoying most about my quest to expand my skills in Illustrator is that I set challenges for myself and then doggedly pursue them and then sit back and smile at my results.
There's a tee shirt that has become a bit of a cliche, and with only slight variations to the design it has been used over and over again in so many designs. I love it so much that I even decided I wanted to riff on it for a design for my podcast and its upcoming merch store. For context, here is the design in one of the many variations it exists in...

And here's what I came up with...

A few days ago, I wrote about how I was working hard to learn things in Illustrator instead of leaning on Fusion360 which I could use to get much quicker results, and man, was it evident here. This design looks simple, but really think about it. I mean sit there, and sketch it out. Now figure out how to illustrate it in a way that would allow you to color the stripes separately (along the lines of the original). Admittedly I didn't do the break between the strokes and just made them all together with no outline but that was intentional; it forced me to make sure I designed this in such a way that the components were all combined using a tool I'm getting comfortable with (for Illustrator users, it's the Shape Builder tool).
Tackling this took me some time, but I think it was time well spent. If I had to do this type of design again I could knock it out very quickly and I think it would turn out equally cool. I'm pretty sure this one is going in our merch store when it's opened and I'm excited about the merch all being shirts that my cohost and I collaborated on in some way and produced ourselves.
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