full zip

Sempervivi Hoodie Design

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Derek Price

Sempervivi

Lexington, KY

Since 2015, I’ve designed several shirts for my pop punk project Sempervivi. As the band has grown, so have our merchandise offerings. We decided to take the next logical step by putting out some hoodies. I have done hoodie graphic design before, but this was special, since it was for my own music project.

Hoodie Graphic Design Story

Printing hoodies can be expensive. I wasn’t sure if there would be a big enough demand for Sempervivi hoodies, so setting up a preorder on our website for a limited run made sense. My friend who prints our shirts (Jeremiah at Flesh and Blood Printshop) might have a few extra blanks lying around. I asked him, and it turned out he had a lucky number of 13 surplus hoodies, both pullovers and full zip ups. There was also a mix of black, dark green, and heather grey garments, in a wide variety of sizes, so it helped create a sense of scarcity.

Once I got our plan in place, I started working on a design, which is usually backward from my usual order of doing things. Our bassist suggested that I create the design around silhouettes of us rocking out. I’ve done this theme several times over the years, both for artists and businesses. I used Adobe Illustrator to outline a few screen captures of live video footage, as well as some professional photos our friend Carmen had taken.

After I arranged the silhouettes, I framed them in a grungy circle of stars, adding the phrase “Kentucky Punks” underneath. To punctuate that phrase, I added our state’s motto “United We Stand, Divided We Fall”. Then, I arched the band name at the top using a tall retro title font. I adjusted the “M” for legibility, and added a small crown at the top to finish the back art.

Finally, I added the front design to the left chest. The silhouette of Kentucky contains the new logo font without the arch, along with the crown.

Hoodie Graphic Design Color Variants

Since we were printing on three different colored garments, I asked our printer to use three different ink color combinations. In addition to this being our first hoodie design, it was our first apparel to feature more than one ink color. For the black hoodies, we used a combination of cyan blue and white. The forest green garments featured orange and white. Lastly, the heather grey hoodie graphic design was printed using black and pink ink.

When I finally nailed down the design and the color schemes, we set up the online preorder for our fans. Once we had sold enough hoodies in advance to break even, I sent the files to press. Suffice to say that everyone loved them! Order yours here.