Real Thread T-shirt Design

The folks at Real Thread asked me to design a dream project: a T-shirt design, for a T-shirt company, that would be screen printed in-house on super-soft tees and sweaters and given as gifts to employees and friends of the comapny. So—basically—I needed to impress people who see hundreds of tees every day and make something they'd love to wear.

Of course my answer was "yes, please" and we considered some lettering options—should the tee have a phrase on it? An internal company value? It wasn't long before we settled on keeping it simple and going with something that everyone involved would be down to wear—REAL THREAD.

My goal for this design was to take something that would normally be done digitally and do it analog. I brush lettered dozens of iterations, threw them on the floor, made a calligraphy pen out of a La Croix can (the sharp aluminum edge gives that intense, energetic calligraphic flow), brush lettered some more, and marked the versions that felt like they had the most energy and life to them.

Next, I scanned those in, combined some of the best letters into one design, and added more texture so the screen printed letters would look like they were painted right onto the fabric. When I received a sweatshirt in the mail, I was so happy to see that it really does look like white paint scrawled across the pocket! You can read more about the process here: https://www.realthread.com/blog/hand-lettering-and-mural-design-hillery-powers-interview