HEX-Clothing Designs

Following the completion of my capsule collection branding, I shortly moved onto clothing designs. During the development of my brand, I was already aware of several ideas I wished to create. Like my logo text, I knew that the majority of my designs would be created using a graphics tablet to help their styles match that of the brand. I had several desires for these clothing designs since the creation of this brief, trying to push the boundaries on the placement of my designs, 

The first idea I chose to create was that of an octopus, something I have been drawing whenever I was bored for a long time now. I knew the tentacles would be one of the most features if this is what I wanted to draw which lead me to the idea of having one wrap around one of the sleeves. As I mentioned, I wanted to try more unusual design placement with my designs because of the amount of common placements that are available today. This resulted in the entire design being placed in the upper right of the shirt, not only does this achieve my desire for unusual placement, but it allows my wrapping around the sleeve idea to be created more easily. To help make this shirt more recognisable as part of this HEX brand, I felt the need to connect the two in a obvious way. I added a globule of ink, appearing to be launched by the octopus placed roughly in the centre of the shirt. Within this I removed the filled black, constructing the word 'Hex' in the process. While I do personally love this design, in terms of practically, this would be very difficult to create in practice due to limitations with common printing. The process behind creating this piece involved me simply sketching the image straight onto this stock image using a graphics tablet. This process took some time but in the end achieved great looking results despite its real life impracticality. This process took too long however to justify it being used for future designs. This also has the limitations of being difficult to to transfer from one stock image to another or across to other clothing items. For the future designs, I decided I would construct them separately and then focus on placement upon completion.

I ended up creating four new designs (to go along side the HEX logo) to be placed on clothing. I decided the basic idea for each design during the construction of my brand logo and now had reached the stage where I would create and add to each idea.

The first idea (top left) was an attempt to create another tiki mask style image, crossing over with a oni mask theme. Once the design was complete (again using the graphics tablet) I placed the HEX text between the horns to fill the gap where something appeared to be missing. The second design (top right) was based on my desire to draw an owl like design. There was some cross over between this and the last with the noticeable feature of the horns, developed slightly more this time around. I wanted to keep this idea looking more simple then the last, using the horns to still draw the viewers eye. My following idea (bottom right) was another owl based idea. Trying to add a little variety in the style of my designs, I paused my use of the graphics tablet and instead constructed this piece using the pen tool in Illustrator. One of the most recognisable features of owls are their large eyes, this is something I wanted to maintain in this design, using gradients to help these stand out further. For my last design I decided to take a different route from my sketch style, this time leaning towards the use of shape, like that of my logo. Quite simple to make, using the pen tool and ellipse tool, I constructed my last design.

Placing everything in situ was a rather time consuming and delicate process, but in the end, I was very pleased with the majority of the results. For each piece of clothing I placed the tiki mask design below the neck at the same place at the same size. Depending on the colour of the item of clothing, I altered my designs to black or white. My four designs from above were fairly simple to place, I leaned towards as large as I could place them. On the hoodie designs however, I added something to the actual hood, whether it was the horns that matched the designs or a segment of my shape design. I also had the idea of having my HEX logo wrap around the body of each clothing piece, which, while it would also be difficult to practically create, the design itself is something I found quite successful.