case study:
British Motor Heritage
services: t-shirt design, licensing
software: adobe illustrator
Industry: clothing , automotive
Ever since I was a kid and taken to my first motor museum, I’ve had a love of classic cars. Britain was the powerhouse of car manufacturing throughout the 20th century and many makes and models are still iconic today. So, as a fan, it was a great joy to work alongside British Motor Heritage to create and license a range of t-shirt designs featuring classic brands like MG, Morris, Rover, and Austin for my site Apparel of Laughs.
the design
There were many iconic and classic cars created by the brands I had access to, so I had to create a cohesive style to work with all of them. I eventually went with two styles one for each brand and one for each model. Each brand comes with their own extensive history so I wanted to celebrate the many cars that rolled off their production lines. I was given access to a wealth of archive material from the different brands so got to work making a collage style t-shirt design that featured as many cars from the manufacturer as possible. They were taken from brochures and adverts for the cars and were often old photographs or beautiful illustrations. The next job was arranging them to create an appealing overall design. I did this for each brand license I had including Rover, Austin-Healey, and Triumph. I made these specifically for people who might have loved the brands, but might not necessarily have any affinity to any particular model.
The next items to design were the t-shirts for each individual model. All of the brands created a wealth of different models with many different variations, which would have been too many to redesign. I used a very helpful online resource to see how many of each model were still on the road and designed the most popular and enduring to recreate. Once I knew what models would make the best shirts, I had to establish an art style that would work with each of them. I ended up drawing each model as a single colour outline, making sure I caught all the details in the headlights, grills, and interior. Once each outline was done, I then added shadow through the use of halftones all on Adobe Illustrator. I’m a big typography fan, and many of the classic model and brand badges on the cars reflect the era perfectly. I wanted to capture these great bits of design and tried my best to accurately recreate the brand marques and model names in their original style on the design.Â
Once I had designed all the cars I wanted, it was just a case of getting them all ready for printing on t-shirts. Each design was created as a vector, so I was able to scale and colour each illustration as I liked without effecting the original. For each car model I picked three to four t-shirt colours I felt best suited the colours those cars originally were painted in. I then changed the design to an appropriate colour to fit on those shirts. As each design featured shadow the colours had to be darker than the t-shirt shade it would be printed on.
Once each design was ready to go, I had to send them all to British Motor Heritage for final approval. Once they gave me the go ahead I uploaded each design to Apparel of Laughs. I arranged them together so any classic car fan can peruse at their leisure. I also organised them via the brands so that any hardcore fan could find exactly the make they wanted straight away.
final thoughts
British automotive history is full of classic brands and models, so it was brilliant to get a peek into the archive and bring back some nostalgia with my new range of t-shirts. To be able to work with such iconic manufacturers like Triumph, Rover, Morris, and Austin was brilliant and something I didn’t take for granted. Now all the designs are online, I hope that many people get a smile from the designs. Whether you were picked up at school, had a poster of it on the wall, or your dad had it to get to work, all these cars kept the UK moving and gave us the freedom to explore!