Our Work / Typecast Promo Tee
Advertising
We were asked to summarise everything that’s good about a new web typography application, on a tshirt. Here’s what we did.
Background
We have been fans of the Front team for quite a while now since both their work and their attitude to work is always an inspiration. Typecast is something they started working on as an internal side project. It’s a service application that allows web designers to make typographic decisions in the browser, with a wealth of web fonts available and no barriers impeding quick experimentation. They had discovered that a good web font app was missing from the marketplace by needing it themselves and rather than just walking away they got to work filling the gap.
By the start of November the application had developed as far as Beta stage, and the team needed to go public with their ideas and cultivate signups from the right kind of people. Jamie got in touch with the idea that they needed some sort of tshirt ‘uniform’ for the team, and that it needed to be a desirable item that clicked with their demographic rather than a boring simple-branded one.
Fossicking for words
It was pretty obvious from the outset that it needed to be a typographic tshirt design rather than an image based one, but after trawling the web and our own back catalogue for good examples we realised that there was a risk of going too geeky, too boring and of creating something nice but ultimately unwearable. So we got to work. Reading every last tweet, dribbble, and word on the typecast website. We watched all the videos and read the public’s comments on each one intently, looking for some key pieces of information that would help make the tee completely owned by the application.
We needed to find something that made sense even without art direction applied, so our first bunch of ideas sent to Front were just words and letters presented cleanly on the page.
Pretty Pictures
The Front together picked ‘Style Guide’ and ‘Vertical Rhythm’ as their two favourites. So now it was time to start scribbling tshirt designs, some of which are shown below.
It was a 50/50 split between two designs, but in the end Vertical Rhythm won. We changed the font to a nice Futura and got them printed in super-quick time to make sure the whole Front team could be seen wearing them at the Build Conference in Belfast.
Typecast is currently still in Beta but you can find out all about it here:
www.typecastapp.com
twitter.com/typecastapp