Green Tortoise Adventure Travel T-Shirt - Sherwood Designs 2011

My good friend Jill has been traveling across the Western US with Green Tortoise for a few years now. She got to talking with the SF Green Tortoise hostel manager, and found out they were looking for some new shirt concepts. A few phone calls later, and yours truly was on the job!

The Green Tortoise buses are a sight to behold and a major factor in the popularity of their adventure trips, and a factor they wanted featured in any shirt design. It’s communal travel in a state of the art touring vessel, guaranteeing a wild time and heaps of camaraderie for the willing. I myself have yet to take a trip on this magic bus, but my days of Couchsurfing tell me that it could be quite special.

With this in mind I sketched up a few bus concepts. Each design led me back to the design here. A turtle with a bus for a shell, cruising down the highway to some crazy cool destination. This design is one-color (to keep screen printing costs down-this is for a hostel after all), but there are tons of iterations in the works.

Green Tortoise Adventure Travel T-Shirt - Sherwood Designs 2011

My good friend Jill has been traveling across the Western US with Green Tortoise for a few years now. She got to talking with the SF Green Tortoise hostel manager, and found out they were looking for some new shirt concepts. A few phone calls later, and yours truly was on the job!

The Green Tortoise buses are a sight to behold and a major factor in the popularity of their adventure trips, and a factor they wanted featured in any shirt design. It’s communal travel in a state of the art touring vessel, guaranteeing a wild time and heaps of camaraderie for the willing. I myself have yet to take a trip on this magic bus, but my days of Couchsurfing tell me that it could be quite special.

With this in mind I sketched up a few bus concepts. Each design led me back to the design here. A turtle with a bus for a shell, cruising down the highway to some crazy cool destination. This design is one-color (to keep screen printing costs down-this is for a hostel after all), but there are tons of iterations in the works.

Tub of Toys Logo (final) - Sherwood Designs 2011

The final Tub of Toys logo, complete with woodblocks, a sock monkey, and a robot!

Tub of Toys block font - Sherwood Designs 2011

In doing the Tub of Toys logo, I also wanted to make a set of children’s alphabet blocks to spell the name of the company. Since I was making 7 letters, I figured I might as well make 19 more and throw in the numbers, too. With the complete block set typeset (Chunk from open source fontsters The League of Moveable Type), Tub of Toys can now spell just about any English word they’ll ever need…

Tub Of Toys - Sherwood Designs 2011

I’m way behind.

Tub of Toys logo is for a web startup. Hasn’t launched yet, so I won’t say much else. This is the work flow that lead to the final piece. Hand sketches brought into illustrator and vectorized. More to follow… 

The Dark Side of the Press - Sherwood Designs 2011

The other day I some how I got into it with my lady about her statement that Neil Young’s “Harvest” was the best record in my vinyl collection (I had just picked it up for her at the good ol’ Goodwill for a cool buck). I threw out a few dozen other classics, and mentioned The Dark side of the Moon’s legendary 777-week streak on the Billboard top 200 charts.

This must have seeded into my brain, as this morning I was doodling that iconic prism as I was working on a project with the CMYK process colors. I then decided to make the above image. That’s it. I added a color halftone effect on the colors inside the prism to better illustrate the color mixing process.

Hoodie concepts - Sherwood Designs 2011

These are two hoodies I thunk up one chilly winters day whilst thumbing through an atlas. As I am an American with no real connection to his heritage, I’ve glommed on to my 1/16th Swedish bloodlines and my deep love for my home state. The graphic designer in me saw the Swedish and California flags as having an interesting layout to be turned into a shirt or hoodie, and one that could wrap around the whole of the article and create a more interesting and powerful overall design that is quite simple.

Featured are the two designs, and one being modeled by my 100% Swedish American bestie.

The Tank - Sherwood Designs 2011

It’s been a while since last posting here, but there have been a lot of little projects in works. My desktop is encumbered with Tumblr ‘to post’ pictures. Enough to last a few days at least… I’ve been busy with life. Officially in a new locale, trying to get square. Thankfully round pegs as skinny as myself will often make through a square or triangular hole…

Back to the design: I’d been plagued with the Original Think Tank logo being too ‘brainy’. My imagery has expanded to incorporate the light bulb, the brain, and the tank. So I went a bit more literal (I wonder if I get too literal at times…) and wanted to create a typographic representation of a tank. I played with a few existing fonts, used two different typefaces, and ultimately created my own font based on the face ‘tierra negra’.

I pieced everything together, rounded the bottoms of the letters in tank to simulate gears on treads, added a barrel and a hatch, and KERPLOW! - Think Tank.

More Think Tank Skateboard Decks! - Sherwood Designs 2011

A few more deck creations of mine.
1 - Bulby Jr. (a creative epiphany thanks to Skully)
2 - Au Natural (while working on Bulby Jr. the text and glossy wood grain popped just right to make me scrap the graphics)
3 - The Tank (after working up a new tank logo, just threw it on a camo BG)
4 - Ambigram Revisited (See below for more info. This was included to complete the series)