Refreshing the Triangle

Saskia emailed me one day and the subject of the email was “Design Project!” Being an artist/graphic designer by trade, I couldn’t open the email fast enough.

I was being asked to take this original design created by Morgan G and make it a new ‘workable’ file for printing and updating the content.

To say I was honored would be an understatement.

Saskia started a listing of Lesbian in other various languages. They wanted to update the file with all the orginial words but also add some new ones and fix any others that might need tweaks as well. Here is the full listing of the word lesbian in all the languages we included on the t shirt.

I first went in to photoshop and seperated the white from the file, then brought it into illustror and started to break a part all the elements of the design so that they could be edited freely. Then I retyped all the words. We decided to take out the tiny triangles that were between all the words to open the design up more and allow for more space between the translations. This shirt was orginially made in the 1970s by Morgan who has been in the type setting and print porudciton world a good part of her life. The offset printing detail that is apart of the triangle was super inportant to me to keep included in the updated design. I felt it gave it its orginal handmade feel, authenticity and nostalgic design. Once I had all these pieces redrawn, redesigned, recalculated into this new file I started to play around with colors. I came up with a few varisations based on my converstion with Morgan. You can see them below. You can also see an orginal photo of someone wearing the t shirt in the 1970s. Morgan mentioned it would be great to have it on a black t shirt, as “lesbians in brooklyn love a black t shirt” and I competley agreed. Below is the final color choice Morgan and Saskia went with. Here is the final updated shirt.

Meeting Morgan - my conversation with morgan.