Project Funeral

A few weeks ago, I had to design some T-shirts for a funeral.
A friend of mine told my mom that his cousin had been killed in a car crash. And they asked me, because I was a graphic designer, to design some T-shirts for the funeral.



This is the subject, Frank Carruthers. Arion and his pals gave me three photos they downloaded off his yahoo gallery.

Now, the first part of designing any topical pictures is deciding what information to include. With a memorial picture, you should probably include the birthdate and deathdate (just in case anyone doesn't know what's going on). Well, that was actually rather convenient, since the digital camera these photos were taken on is one of the dorky kinds that automatically inserts a date stamp onto the photos when they are uploaded.

...like this.

This date stamp is usually annoying, but today it worked to my advantage. All I had to do was change the date so it would read the death date, then add an identical one listing the birth date.
Now, since the stamp was actually part of the image, and not just a text file, the altering was a bit tough to do. First off, I had to erase the existing month and day stamp on there. This meant highlighting a small area of his shirt right above where the date was printed, copying it, and then pasting it down over the offeding numbers on the date stamp.


Now you see it, now you don't.

Once that was done, I had to put in new numbers, which was the only realy hard part since I couldn't tell just by looking what font it was, and I wanted it to match. I could have just airbrushed over the entire stamp and put in new numbers, but efficiency is my watchword, and it would be a shame to waste the stamp on the one occasion in ten million in which part of it may prove useful. So, after a little trial and error with a few thin sans sarif fonts, I located it, scaled the size and entered in some new numbers, namely the date of the accident.
Then I copied it and placed a new number right beside it, this one his birthdate (Arion was kind enough to supply me with that). And I put a little "~" between them to symbolize that time had passed between the two dates.

Now, to make them stand out more, I had to change the color to indigo, a color that stands out more than the pale lemony yellow of the stamp, and surround it with a bright yellow border instead.

Here's a little tip: when contrasting with yellow, it's best to use indigo, not purple.
Purple, the direct complement to yellow (meaning the opposite color on the color wheel) has the highest contrast with yellow, so in theory it should stand out more, but it doesn't. You see, the sun is yellow, so yellow sunlight refracted into our corneas skews our perception of colors, causing us to see purple instead of blue as one of the primary colors. Now here's a little secret they don't teach you in art school: complementary colors do not work well together. Go with a split complement (colors adjacent to the opposite color), which in this case means either red or indigo.

Now that the borders were completed, it was time for a message. Now this is the part that requires the least nitpicking and the most creativity. Especially since I had to work with input on this. A short poem (it'd have to be pretty short to fit on a T-shirt)? Or something simpler?
Eventually, Arion's friends and I agreed to keep it simple, just a simple, "WE LOVE YOU, FRANK."

Since two of the three pictures had Frank's face in the center (not full-body shots), there was space above his head in the photo. So it made sense to put the message above him.


Like that.

Now, I had to arc the text to make it look more organic (text in a straight line on a picture looks too clinical), and do the same other stuff with a border (but since it was a larger text, I had to make it a larger border), and that was done. After that all I had to do was put my company logo in the corner of each pic (I did feel a pang of guilt about advertizing this, but I had to take a little credit for helping out, besides I didn't make it too prominent), and it was just that simple.

Two of the photos were done with the same format.


But the third photo was a sideways shot.

This made it a little tougher, since there was so little width and so much height. The date thing was done the same way, but there wasn't enough room across the top for the same message to fit.

However, there was plenty of space along the right side of the photo, which opened up the possibility of doing something there.


By clipping the word "Frank" off the message on top I scaled that message down enough to make it fit on the top of the picture, and by putting it on the side vertically I did something interesting with that space, and the vertical format drew the eye onto the name.

After that, my job was done, and it was onto the business part, getting it printed onto the T-shirts themselves.

Well, that's my part of the story. Hope you liked it.