Service T-shirt Designing

Recycling and Sustainably is a service group at the Overseas School of Colombo (OSC) which is a leading environment action group who aims to reduce the ecological footprint through recycling resources and rising awareness. I have been participating in this service group since the past 2 years, I am also participating this year, and will continue next year as well. This service group at OSC has been one of the oldest running service groups for more than a decade. Since the past 2 years we, as a service group, we have been talking about printing service t-shirts, and I thought this would be a great idea as our service is one of the oldest service groups at Overseas School of Colombo. But till now nobody has created any designs and eventually we all forgot about it.

This year one of my service goals is to design a Recycling and Sustainability t-shirt and get the t-shirts printed by the end of this semester, because I want to make this happen and make our service get their 1^st service t-shirts. I wanted to achieve this goal as soon as possible because almost every service group at OSC have their own service T-shirts or some sort of clothing material, and I thought my service needs one as well. Besides waiting for someone to make a design for us, which could have taken a long time, I decided to design one myself and if everyone in my service group likes it then we will proceed to print it. I also had an intention if Recycling and Sustainability has at least one T-shirt to represent itself, then in the future we can approach other artists to create a new and better design for this service and have new T-shirts for future generations.

Process:

When it comes for designing T-shirts for an important part of community of the school, I thought the best design will be to keep the artistic designs simple and straightly represent the service goal. With this aim I created this design below. This was the 1^st design I made with arrows representing the recycling cycle and I chose green color on black T-shirt because green on black gives a good contrast and green is this service’s primary color.

In this design I’ve created a separate logo which represents ‘Recycling’ on the front side of the T-shirt and then ‘RnS’ which is meant to be short for ‘Recycling and Sustainability’.  This was my service leader Devin’s idea for including ‘RnS’ and it also sounds and looks very creative. On the back I’ve included ‘RnS’ and then ‘Train to Sustain’ because that was our slogan since past 2 years, and a name of the service candidate.  After finishing this design, we as a service group had selected it but I thought it’s not detailed enough to bring out our service’s goal of reducing ecological footprint.  So I began on redesigning a new t-shirt.

After brainstorming some ideas I created a new back design for the t-shirt and kept the front as it was. The flows I founded in the previous design was that it doesn’t bring up our service goal and doesn’t say anywhere the actual name of the service ‘Recycling and sustainability’. So at the back with ‘RnS’ I also added it’s full form of ‘Recycling and sustainability’. Beneath that Devin, our service leader, designed a new footprint logo saying ‘ecological’ which represents ecological footprint.

On the sides I added the year of when it was created and the OSC logo to represents the school.  This design represents our service and looks very creative, so I scanned the hand-made design shown below  and using Photoshop colored it the same color as the text. I personally loved this design and our service coordinator also gave positive feedback, this design was finalized and will be printed next semester.

Besides this I also created a polo-neck T-shirt for only service leaders and service coordinator because I wanted the leaders and coordinator to stand out and have the audience know that they were leaders and coordinator for this service. This t-shirt also has their name with polo neck and everything else is the same. This t-shirt also looks very formal by which during service meetings, assemblies, and other service related meetings, they can wear this. It also makes them to stand out and make them feel like a leader in this service. Our service also liked this design and we have confirmed to print 2 separate designs, one for the service group and to sell, and the polo neck one only for the leaders and coordinator.

Now I feel that I’ve accomplished something for our service since the past 3 years and now we can also have our own labeled t-shirt as other service in OSC do. Now I hope if everyone in and outside school buys our t-shirt and spread the awareness of recycling resources, it will be a success for us and the planet itself.