T-Shirt Design

I work as a volunteer photographer for a music festival every summer. The shifts are long and tiring, but besides the unfettered backstage access and the great music, my other reward when the days end is trading songs with friends and acquaintances around the campground song-circle. It’s also sometimes a chance for the volunteers to vent about management. A couple of years ago the volunteer coördinator was feeling particularly blue about various snafus. During an extended rant, he proposed (tongue-in-cheek) unionizing the volunteers. This led to the idea of designing a union label for our fictitious union.

The idea percolated in my head for a year-and-a-half but I finally decided to make it real. I designed the label in Adobe Illustrator, showed it to the festival regulars, took feedback, and after several iterations finalized the design you see here. I found a custom printer to make the shirts (below), and I’ll deliver them at the festival next summer.