One of the things I wanted to do with this blog is give tips to both designers and entrepreneurs as well sell my own shirts.   I've been a bit lax on the tips posts.

So, I'll combine a tip on how to design and profile a new design all at the same time.

One of the latest designs I came up with was an attempt to meld typography and pop culture aspects into one.   Beards are a fun thing for geeks to discuss as in Epic Beard Man or Brett Keisel.  Maybe it's a man thing or just a silly thing to love.  In any case, beards are a party down below.

I started to think about the phrase attached to the mullet, "Business up front and party in the back."  I thought about applying that idea to a beard and ran through my head, "Party down below."   Of course, I wasn't the first person to say that phrase but not a lot of people applied to a shirt design.

Along with the phrase, I wanted something fun to use as the delivery method for the phrase.  I began playing with different elements of how to design a beard with the phrase involved.   What I settled on was that the phrase could be the beard.   Then came the hard part; how do I draw that?

I drew a common looking beard, nothing realistic and then tried to draw the letters into the available space.  I played with different brushes and effects in Photoshop before realizing that it would be simple in Paint.Net, my go to paint program.

 

 Better attempt using Outline Object tool

In order to achieve the effect, I simply used Microsoft Word's Word Art tool to draw the phrase in a curve above and below, using the available space of the beard.  But I didn't like the overall effect.  It didn't have texture or the appearance of a real beard.  Then an idea struck me.  If I was using the available space, anyway, why not just build on the words as the actual beard?  Then, all I did was continually add Outline Object until the consistency was just about right.  Lastly, I cut out a mouth area between the words.

A Beard Is a Party Down Below
by Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!

There you have it.  It's a very simple process that can be used to do a lot of different words as shapes.