Scott Joyce

illustrator | animator | designer

Bath Digital Festival t-shirt

Client: Deep Blue Sky Digital Limited deepbluesky.com, organisers of the Bath Digital Festival 2017 bathdigitalfestival.co.uk

Commission: I entered a competition to design a t-shirt for the Bath Digital Festival and my design was selected as the winning submission. The brief was to creatively demonstrate this year’s theme ‘tech for everyone’ whilst including the fact that the festival was 5 years old.

I asked Jess what was it about my submitted design that made it the winner and this is what she said:
It was a really tough competition this year. But what we loved about this design was how well it aligned with this year’s theme, “tech for everyone” showing a diverse range of technology and people. We really wanted to open the festival up this year and Scott’s design really helped us to convey that message.

I also asked her for feedback on how the t-shirts went down at the festival and this is what she said:
People loved them! The t-shirts made our volunteers really stand out at our events and plenty of our festival goers liked them so much they bought one of their own to take home.

To begin with, I did some research on tech online and using Pinterest. By gathering my research this gave me a really good overview of what I perceived today’s tech to be. I then started to sketch ideas in my sketch pad. I did a whole number of sketches to help develop my ideas. Here are some of them below.

As you can see I developed my idea of people using tech and robots all working together. I wanted it to have a fun appeal. Once I’d done the sketch that is in a circle above, I knew I still needed to incorporate the fact that the festival was in its fifth year. I sketched out the number 5 a few times, then I came out with this version above right. All the people and robots I needed in place.

I then decided to go over to the computer to map out the composition. This would also confirm how much space I had to draw my characters. To start with I tried to find a good font that had a number 5 that would be suitable. I had a fairly good rummage, but after looking I thought it would be easier just to draw a number 5. This way I knew I could have equal sizing consistent across the whole number character. As I have a graphic design background and a good knowledge of typography this was straight forward. Just draw a circle and some lines, position them correctly and outline them.

I then positioned tech for everyone within the number 5, printed this out and sketched my characters within it, apart from the drone of course. I scanned this back in. In Adobe illustrator I selected my black line brush and traced my pencil characters.

All I had to do now was colour them in. As part of the brief, I had to stick within a colour palette: black, blue, green, orange and magenta. With this in mind, I gave all the people orange hair and submitted my design above left. I was then told my design was the winning design, but could I please amend the design slightly to include a more ethnically diverse group of people, so I did. It was also decided to make the number 5 blue, which I did have before I changed it to pink. So above right was the finished design.

Thank you to Bath Digital Festival for sharing some of their photos below of the t-shirt at the festival including one of me with a great cheesy grin!