Design Portfolio: Costume Tees (Resource Rags)

As a graphic designer you are often paid to follow through with someone else's idea, that, to me at least, is pretty fun, but when you get to realize your own ideas it's a whole different ball game!

At my job at Resource Rags I am responsible for a significant amount of the new designs, helping create them and then eventually sell them to our customers. The coolest part of my job is when I am given full reign to do whatever I want in the design department.
We had thrown around the idea of doing costume t-shirts before and decided to go for it and see what happened, so I dove in head first and in five days had designed over 20 different styles and was on my way to the Halloween, Costume & Party Trade Show in Las Vegas. I made lists and brainstormed any idea I could think of, some I was definitely more fond of than others, but here are the results. 

(click to make bigger)

When I was brainstorming ideas for t-shirts, I kept thinking of my favourite costumes that I've seen over the years. There was a family of iPods, the Mom was a Mini and the Baby was a shuffle and the Dad was a Video and it got me thinking about things. First, family oriented costumes, and second, abstract costume ideas, not just the obvious Pirate, Clown, Tuxedo and Cowboy-style shirts. 

Design-wise, as you can see each shirt is high impact even though it uses a limited amount of colours. The only exception being the shirts that we print digitally (Hairy European Guy, Cut Out Abs.)

One of my favourites is the Ninja Turtle shirt, as it is a large print but only two colours, but because I took the shirt colour into account when designing, I was able to portray even more colours with the shirt idea. 

The Chest Cavity tee looks like it uses multiple colours, however, it actually only has a 3 color print on it using halftones and a similar process to cmyk printing. 

Anyways, take a look at the tees and let me know which ones are YOUR favourite!