One Rag to Rule Them All

I recently participated in the Southern California Ragnar relay, which is a 200-ish mile relay from Huntington Beach to San Diego. It was a lot of fun meeting up with new and old friends to engage in physical exertion and loss of sleep, with the glimmering hope of a free beer at the finish line to spur us on.

In any case, I collaborated with another teammate on designing the t-shirt for out team, the Fellowship of the Rag. Yes, the name is as juvenile and disgusting as you might think. Our concept was to incorporate joining hands/arms around a red dot, with all the pertinent event information, as well as the names of our runners and volunteers.

I started out sketching some hands and circles, to envision how to set them up:

After determining the sizing and position I wanted for the hands, I put some sketches on the lightbox to get a cleaned up forearm to use as a template in Illustrator. I wanted to get the pencil work pretty clean before getting to the computer, to reduce guess-work:

I traced the forearm and hand as separate shapes to be able to change the angle at the wrist:

Since we were going for a 2-color print, I wanted to make the elements simple and readable. To this end, I made sure to leave gaps between the fingers, so they would read better:

Once I had the hand and arm positioned relative to eachother, I joined them into a single shape with the pathfinder tool in Illustrator.

Then it was a matter of pasting copies of the forearm, each rotated 30 degrees, to make a circle of 12 arms.

Then text was added for the runner and volunteer names, as well as the team name.

Pretty quick from start to finish and I'm already getting ideas to work in next year.