Setting up Necessary Promotion

I spent my night sorting out making loose a legitimate business and also sorting out places i could sell cloths and places to promote. 

Long night i had to secure our business name through the company warehouse, then set up a PayPal account so i could then set up a Big Cartel site then started a tumblr to help with promotions. I let Chris tackel the Facebook side as i'd had enough of looking at a computer by the end of the night. 

Big Cartel is a place where independent clothing companies can go to sell there items. It's a really useful site its easy to set up and you can change you layout and design similar to a tumblr.

We can only have 5 items of clothes up for sale. if you want up to 10 you have to pay £10 a month.  

Laser Cutting Loose

We wanted to make the clothes seem more professional so we planned to created swing tags to attach on the clothes. Chris wanted to use wood but i suggested to use mount-board as i thought it would be a suitable thickness, sturdy and relatively quick to cut out. 

I produced 2 different designs on both white and black. we cut enough out to go with all the clothes. I think we will attach the tags with safety pins but i need to see if they damage the clothes.

New Tags

We plan to screen Print the tags and then use the lazer cutter to cut them out. So to make sure that they would line up perfectly i made the document which would enable us to line the to processes together. 

I have made a outline round the document which will be screen-printed along with the tags so i would get registration marks so i could line the lazer cutter up perfectly. 

Finished Document

Document for Screen-print

Document for Lazer-cutter

2nd Print Run

After the disaster first time round and our new and fresher designs we were much more carful with every single step of the printing from measuring the design on exposure unit so its centred perfectly. making sure our t-shirts were bang on in the middle of our screen and we were clean freaks. Taping up and suspicious holes on the screen and washing our hand constantly. 

Printing went down perfectly and we were very efficient for time we were at factory 4. The t-shirts came out much better printed quality and also we screen printed the inside tags on every t-shirt we had. Looooong. we managed to do it and i think it looks great. 

Final T-shirts Design Ready for Print

Dyeing Clothes

Me and Chris wanted to try our hand a a bit more than just printing onto clothes so we tried our hands at dying them also to make them more unique. We brought a variety of colours to experiment with. I suggested we try our hands at dip dying as it is a very simple method and you get a nice gradient effect also. 

We were unhappy with some of the colours that we dyed as they didn't end up the colour we were expecting. Such as the Grey that we got ended up looking very green so that was a bit disappointing. 

In the end it was a good experiment and we enjoyed the process which i surpose is a bonus. 

Getting T-shirt Designs ready for print

The pattern design t-shirt despite my best efforts had holes and little gaps. which is so annoying having to go though and sort them out. it's not just as simple as moving the shape as that sometimes creates new gaps. 

These two photos below show that you may see a gap when you are zoomed in but when you are at a normal very you can't see it. this makes it very annoying and makes it hard to spot these bloody holes in my work. 

Here is the finished pattern with no gaps. finally. 

I then split the finished design and pattern into 3 colours so we could print them out easily and they should theoretically line up beautifully. 

This is the final design which we will be sending to dots print. we would love to do this ourselves but been relatively new to screen printing we feel that there is to much money that could be wasted trying to perfect 3 separate colours. I feel that we haven't got enough experience but after i have got my confidence up i hope to be pushing multiple colour though screens.

New Logo Direction

I don't like the loose logo i created at all i look at it and i just am unhappy with is every time i see it. It doen't work by it's self or with anything else type or image based. 

We have printed t-shirts with is on but i am the client for this logo so i just can't have it. I spoke to chris about it and he said show him something better and he will be willing to change this late on in the brief. 

I got the tablet out and tried a new style of drawing. I didn't want to do joined up lettering i felt the word loose didn't flow nicely to do this. so i Tried drawing single letters at a time. 

This drawing i stared to like. i really like the formation of the "O" and the "S"looks really nice. So what i would do when i found a letter i liked i could take them and try and imitate the good letters and create a word that flows in the same style lettering. 

The logo now is moving in a better direction i created the L and the "e" derived from the "o" following a similar curve making the word low much better.

I then made the typeface thicker to close the to gap of the o's stopping any chance of them becoming a u. Making it thicker has also brought the letters forward and made them sit together much better. I also started to experiment with highlighting the curvature of the lettering.

I then played around with different ways of excentuating the curves with a with line showing twists i the lettering. i am starting to like this direction more. 

I developed the places i created the twists at and i think i does add a nice touch to the word. I am so much happier with this new logo direction and happy i pushed myself to do it instead of taking a direction i wasn't happy with just because i got comfortable with it. 

Chris really was impressed with the new logo aslo an i think it gave us a bit of a lift after the first print run with kind of put a bit of a downer on us both. 

I think it jells much better for our target audience and am curious to what Amber will have to say tomorrow in my progress crit. I would want to find out if she feels we are running out what her opinion in changing the logo in such a late stage.