One of the great things about my work is I get to learn many new things, by meeting many different people from many different walks of life.
Similarly, the very successful owners and staff of Hideaway Pizza in Tulsa, Oklahoma meet a ton of people who dig their gourmet pizza. Lots of families with kids and college students populate the 23 restaurants Hideaway currently operates in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
“Making your pizza dreams come true since 1957” was the caption for the shirt in the original concept stage. Hideaway Pizza’s original founder opened the first restaurant in Stillwater, Oklahoma in 1957. It immediately was a big hit in that college town, a little hippie, counter-culture pizza joint before the 60’s had even begun. In several of the t-shirt comps, you’ll notice there are several different logos. In some of the compositions, I used the ‘classic,’ original Hideaway, we call it the ‘swoosh,’ as it recalls (and pre-dates!) the famous Nike swoosh. The current Hideaway logo is characterized by the red branding color (Pantone 185) and the Dom Casual font. You can see that logo on the back of the final shirt (see below).
So let’s talk about kids and popular culture! Kids are into to some wild stuff. Apparently, a ‘thing’ these days is depicting anything imbued with ‘super-ultimate-awesomeness’ with crazy photo-montaged images that include (but not limited to): sloths, unicorns, dragons, panda bears, and the like—basically, any awesome animal—piled high atop, preferably, a unicorn. If any of the aforementioned shoot lasers out their eyes—and/or rainbows—so much the more awesome dude. Don’t ask me, I didn’t think of it. Its very popular. The owners at Hideaway asked me to come up with ideas in that vein for some t-shirts to bolster the stock in their very busy merchandise business; the employees also wear the colorful tie-dye and custom t-shirts Hideaway is so well known for, its an integral part of their branding.
The ideas below are what I came up with. As I said, most of the idea was at the behest of the staff at Hideaway. Except the dolphin and the corgi. How could you not have a dolphin. And the corgi was DEFINITELY MY idea – ha, corgis rule! And so does Hideaway Pizza: delish! :
First Round Ideas
Its nice to have clients that support the creative process. Hideaway likes me to throw out the most creative ideas in the concept stage, they really want something original, innovative and fun. Then we figure out how to bring the ideas to life.
Hideaway wanted to do a full-color photo/digital illustration, as opposed to a silk screened shirt, which is what they do typically. Often, they will silkscreen their signature branding designs in 1-2 colors on tie-dye shirts.
These shirts, featuring the fantasy art, will be solid color shirts, probably black, pink and blue. In these first comps, I let the design and illustration fill the shirt. In reality, it would be unreasonably expensive (but possible) to print full-color seam-to-seam, on a shirt. In subsequent rounds of refinement, you’ll see the designs shift from filling the shirt, to smaller confined shapes like frames, boxes, and circles. Containing the design in a fixed area—final size was roughly 8″ x 8″—makes it cost effective and easier to print on the shirt.
Second Round Ideas
We narrowed our choices, and determined that we didn’t want the design to print edge-to-edge, it would be prohibitively expensive to do so.
Hence, in these designs I utilized frames and shapes to contain the artwork. Ideally, the frames and associated design elements become visually integrated into the illustration.
Final Shirt
For the final shirt, the design was further simplified into the feathered circular shape. The final full color printing will actually be a dot-printed, 7 color silkscreen that works much the way CMYK full-color printers blend dots of color for glossy magazines and high-end print jobs. Silkscreen technology has made what used to be impossible, possible. Design-wise, it was decided to take the Hideaway logo and all text off the front of the shirt. And do a 1-color print on the back of the shirt: red, with the restaurant company’s recently redesigned logo.
