Moving Forward

So the nice people from SSMC were organising their annual family camp. They asked if we could kindly design the camp t-shirt. The theme was Moving Forward. Can we have something energetic? Something about the church on the move? “No problemo,” I said, “And who would be wearing these tees?” “Just about everybody!” They replied. ”Kids, tweens, teens, young people, Oon Tian, old people, people almost home.” “Uh, ok.” Relatively easy …

Anyhow, since I am a Creative Director and therefore only able to tell other people what to do, I emailed regular Sunday Morning artist Josh and asked if he could come up with a few illos. Despite my subsequent brief being as clear as the Klang River, the guy - I think – instinctively understood what we wanted. Several weeks later, he came back with the following:

  

The design shows a man in motion. He is placed against the silhouette of a rising eagle – to symbolise speed, strength and renewal. As the verse goes, Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles.

I think it looks stupendous and everybody at SSMC – ok, the people whose job it is to approve the camp tees – thought so too. At least, they gave that impression. Altogther, about 160+ tees were produced and I’ve been told all stocks have been bought up. Jolly great job, Josh!

Happy Campers

Alright, ok. Admittedly, that wasn’t our first design. Creatives being creatives, we had to experiment with all sorts of animals and colours. Here are some of the early works:

Hmmm ... interesting. But a giant hare could be scary. Besides, the bible doesn't mention rabbits and some people might say the animal didn't exist back then ...

Doesn't quite signify speed ...

Arguably one of the fastest land animal back then. I didn't quite feel this ...

Well yes, the bible does mention fish but mostly in the context of people eating them. Yes, I know the sailfish is the fastest creature in the sea but ... (Josh and I tend to argue a lot).

Not quite there I think.

According to the Chinese zodiac, the rat is the fastest land animal. We somehow felt this argument might not go down too well with the Christian crowd.

345 animals later, including a flying unicorn and I think there was one with Thomas the train engine, we eventually ended up with this. Not bad, not bad.

Safe and Sound

So the folks at The New Covenant Church approached us and asked if we could kindly design their Family Camp t-shirt. The theme was ‘Safe & Sound’ and could we have a child’s hand resting on a bigger hand, or something like that? “Sure” I said, ”No problemo”. That was in mid-April, with the event being scheduled for July. Long deadline notwithstanding, most creative people will of course only start work two days before it’s due.

What inevitably happens after that are several more weeks of procrastination, days staring blankly at the wall, excuses ranging from my cat is pregnant to my car is pregnant; and about half a dozen polite “Can we see something?” emails. Only then will the ideas start flowing. Trust me, I do this for a living.

Anyway, instead of showing you the finished product, I thought I’d share about the ‘ideation’ process – how we arrived at the initial thought, how it evolved and what it eventually became …

Unlike what you see on Mad Men, there was nothing glamourous about how the idea came about. I was sitting in my room with nothing to do as usual when I thought "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could show people surrounded by a landscape that looked like a giant hand?" I then drew this and passed it to whoever happened to be walking past my room.

Couple of days later, he came back with this. Hmmm, not exactly what I had in mind ...

And then this one appeared. "Try again," I said.

I said, "Make the fingers look less like fingers and more like landscape. And you know, the people don't have to look like people. Make them a bit surreal."

I said, "Ok, let's do this again. The people needs to be part of a landscape that looks like a giant hand. You got that? People + Giant hand?"

I tilted my hand and said, "Maybe you just need to see a bit of the hand. Put the fingers in the background, and have the people in the foreground. Maybe put some bushes and scrubs too, so it looks like a landscape."

I said, "How about you make it more natural? Like the people and landscape are one?"

"Right," I said. "Forget everything I told you and do what you think is right. You still have the brief? You've lost the brief haven't you?!"

"Well, this is finally getting there ... the girl in the earlier picture on the right looked like she was sitting on a wolf or something."

And voila! The finished product. I think it looks stupendous!

Many thanks to our long-suffering artists Joshua and Foong, who made all this possible.

Pathfinders on the go

So the Pathfinders decided to make some tees for themselves. But they didn’t want any of those round neck-tees with dreadful designs (like Sunday Morning for example). Instead, they asked for nice, sensible, collar-ed tees that would look good on an outdoorsy camping trip.

Not a problem. Except that it was just before CNY and almost all the suppliers were closed. The remaining few that weren’t were based in Kazakhstan or Poland I think and nobody wanted to go all the way there. So after a couple of frantic calls, finger-pointing and massive blame-shifting, we somehow managed to track the one supplier who didn’t know it was CNY and get the tees out. Just in time for the Pathfinders’s pre-Chap Goh Mei hike to Broga Hill. 

Thanks to Lai Choo for all her hard work and to Daniel Tan who took this picture. Christine and Lisha, you guys look fab!

Pathfinders

SSMC asked us to come up with a name and logo for their new young adult ministry. The idea is to get young people (twenty-somethings, newly married, married with kids) together in activities like camping, hiking, racquet games etc to build closer relationships.

I presented a couple of names which, uh, didn’t go down too well. Then one of the guys suggested ‘Pathfinders’, which everybody immediately liked.  But they still needed a logo and I guess nobody knew how to handle Adobe Illustrator well enough so I was called back.

After tinkering with it for a couple of weeks, we arrived at the product below. It still makes my day. Pathfinders logo created by SundayMorningAsia in collaboration with Ervie Yeo, a Malaysian designer.

Camp tees – ZFGC

Photography: WongLiJi

So we were in Batam for our annual church camp, from Thurs to Sun last week. Photos of the event are popping up all over facebook and am busy un-tagging the embarrassing ones. Was asked by the youth to design their camp tee and came up with the above idea. Typography done by marvellously patient Zoe Ong, an up-and-coming Art Director based in Singapore.