8th Annual AmericanMuscle Mustang Show

The AmericanMuscle Mustang Show is the largest all-Mustang car show in the country and every year it gets bigger and better. This year I've been helping the team by working on various graphics for the 8th Annual Show. One of the first projects I had worked on was an apparel project for the Mustang show. During the car show season, we typically up our game on the apparel selection to have new items for sale at the show and on site. Last year was when we launched a new selection of AmericanMuscle hats. This year I have several new garments in the work in addition to the special event shirts. One of those event shirts includes our charity t-shirt that is sold at the charity booth. AmericanMuscle is proud to have Make-A-Wish as their Mustang show charity for the second year in a row. 

I began designing the "day of" Make-A-Wish show t-shirt by sketching some ideas on paper. General concepts included flags (American and checkered), stars, street signs, badges, tools and a variety of other automotive design elements. Below are the initial four sketches I had come up with.

Sometimes when logos are involved I don't want to spend a lot of time sketching them out over and over again, so instead I will print them out at a small size, cut them out and tape them on a piece of paper to sketch around them. As you can see, that's what I did in the above four sketches with the AmericanMuscle Mustang Show logo and the Make-A-Wish logo. I find that doing that also gives you a more efficient and extremely accurate sizing of the logo(s). 

I was fairly pleased with the first two logos I sketched, in fact after the first design I considered stopping there and vectorizing that one immediately and submitting that design for proof. It's always best to sketch past your first design, even if it is the design to ultimately get chosen as the final product. In this case, I am glad I did seeing that the others turned out quite well in vector form as well. I did limit it to vectorizing only three due to time.

I was still sold on the first two, but also felt the third made for a nice design as well. I then mocked them up on different garments to see which design would make it through proofing and to the printers. The general color direction was not established so I proposed three different versions based on the AmericanMuscle color palette and the Make-A-Wish palette.

Overall the first two designs were the favorites, and we landed on the second design on the royal blue shirt. I did do some final tweaks to the front of the design, including removing the small print that ran along the flag stripes. The thought was the type would be a little small for the printer, and the design could certainly be successful without it. 

The back of the shirt had to include all of the AmericanMuscle Mustang Show "Platinum Sponsors" so I made sure the logos were vectorized and converted into one color and proceeded to grid them out in alphabetical order. To keep this entire design a one colored screen, I made the back logos the same color as the front. I then used one of our previous in-house product shots to composite the front and back design on the shirt so it could be used as a web product image on the Mustang show landing page e-commerce had developed.

After several rounds of proofing and confirming the final vendor list, the shirt was ready to be printed. The merchandising team sourced the garments and found a high quality shirt. You can preorder the adult shirt here: AmericanMuscle.com/car-show-shirt-adult.html or the matching youth shirt here: AmericanMuscle.com/car-show-shirt-youth.html. I am looking forward to seeing this sold at the 8th Annual AmericanMuscle Mustang Show along with the several other apparel and accessory items I have been working on. Stay tuned for more car show related designs and materials.