First, a big congratulations to T-Lou for getting her slogan printed. Way to go! Second, a huge thank you to Threadless for allowing me the opportunity to create a design based around this slogan, and many thanks to everyone who helped critique this from its initial stages to the final product.

And on that note, if anyone is interested, here's a rundown of the process that went into this design. It went through a whole bunch of changes on the way. Click the images to see the full-size versions.

My initial concept for this design was actually drastically different. My first plan was to fold money into letter shapes and have that spell out the slogan. But that didn't really fit the slogan as well as I wanted it to, plus, I was having trouble making some of the letters look right (I fail at origami). My next idea was to base the design around a graduation cap and gown with hand drawn text making up the shapes of each. But that felt kind of boring.

Then, I was sitting at my desk at work, and it hit me: Students have lots of text books! Maybe I could write the slogan out on the spines of a stack of books. So that's what I decided to go with.

Since I'm absolutely terrible at drawing without references, I took some pictures of a small stack of books at home and based my outline on that. Then I just chose some placeholder text for the slogan so I could get an idea of how it would look on the spines.



Originally I was going to have a check underneath the bottom book, but then it was suggested to use the check as a bookmark instead. I also added a "used" sticker to give it the ol' college feel and took the suggestion to put an economy-based design on the top book cover ('cause, you know...money).



I played around with some different fonts, added another used sticker, and tacked on a couple of those publishing company symbols on the spine along with an edition marker.



More font changes. Still wasn't completely crazy about them.



I finally found some fonts I was happy with, and so I colored everything in and added textures. To create the textures, I scanned the covers of two different books and took a picture of what pages of a book look like when the book is closed. I played with the settings in GIMP to reduce the textures to black and white versions and added them into the drawing. It was also suggested that there should be some random objects in the picture, so I added in some paperclips.



Changed the textures a bit because some of them were much too heavy.



Changed all the text color to black for better consistency and deleted the second "used" sticker.



While originally I had liked the clean vector version, the suggestion had been made all along that I hand draw the entire thing. So I took the simple approach and printed out my outlines and just traced over them. Luckily I have really shitty pen control, so the lines came out nice and shaky.



Made all the book textures the same because the top two didn't look very book-like.



A suggestion was made to swap the colors of some of the books for better balance.



At this point I was happy with the result. But then someone said that it might look nice as a one-color design instead. So what the hell.



One color looked pretty neat to me (plus it gave me an excuse to use one of my favorite shirt colors, forest green), but it seemed a bit flat. So I took the advice of using two slightly different shades of blue instead.



I made the lighter shade of blue a little bit brighter and enlarged the text some.



And that was that! Threadless was happy with the result, but the only change they wanted was to remove the paperclips. And that was fine by me.



So there you have it. What was originally a multi-colored design reduced down a simpler two-color design. While I still like the multi-color version, I'm really happy the suggestion was made to try one color, which eventually changed to two colors. I find it much more soothing and somber, which I think fits the tone of the slogan more. Thanks again to everyone for their help!

Here's a husky puppy.