the tale of the island party shirt.

island party is an annual outreach event put on by my fraternity, brothers under christ, and is going to be held on april 21. i am currently the t-shirt design chair and i run a committee of five guys. so naturally with a big event like island party, we need soemthing to sell to the masses. this being my last semester to design t-shirts for byx, i decided to do this design solo without the rest of the committee. after sketching out many concepts, i came up with this sketch and presented it to the officers on april 1st to make sure it's kosher to put on a shirt.


they freakin loved it and said go for it. it's a rendering of jesus to look like one of those hula things you put on your dashboard. and it fits perfectly for an event like island party. it's a fun event and the shirt needs to reflect that, as well as showing that contrary to stereotypes, christians don't have a "no fun allowed" attitude on life. so the officers told me to go ahead and finish it and get it to the guy that usually prints our shirts asap. so i did so. i came up with a final front and back image and sent it to joey on the morning of the 10th. these are the finished designs:



ok, awesome. i'm done.

not quite. on wednesday night on my way back from a texas rangers loss at the ballpark, i get a call from the officers. they tell me they don't want to use the front design for the island party shirts anymore because it is a negative portrayal of jesus. really? a flowered hawaiian shirt and a ukelele create a negative image? i don't really see it. well they go on to explain that a few people have gone to them and said it's not the way jesus should be illustrated because it's not going get people to want to seek a personal relationship with him. the term marijuana was also brought up in describing the picture.

first off, it's completely unprofessional and ridiculous that they okayed the design and then changed their mind a week and a half later and after the design was already sent in. i work for free and spent a good twelve to fourteen hours on the project. doing what they did is no way to treat someone who's working pro bono. if they had any second thoughts about the design, they should have killed it back in the draft stages, not after the design is completely finished, and certainly not after it's been sent to the printer who's running a business.

second, there is no way the image i created generates a negative portrayal of jesus. it's a cartoon based illustration with a ukelele and a huge smile. how does that create negative thoughts in anyone? and just because he has long hair and a beard, that doesn't mean he's a doobie-smoking hipster. google search images of jesus and all of them show a long haired and bearded man.

i sat there and thought about it for a bit and i sketched out an image of what seems to be really portrayed in my original design:


they both look awfully alike, don't they?

anyway, they had cancelled all the orders from joey, which he had already started printing. so now byx is out of an amount of money equal to 200 t-shirts. they then called me thursday morning and said they want to keep the back design but want me to come up with a new front one by friday. i told them no, they need to find someone else to make the shirts and that they may not use my back design. and that was that. later that day they sent out a mass email to all the byx members with the new shirt designs:



yeah, that shirt's going to make a lot of people seek a personal relationship with jesus. as my roommate dave specha described it "that new shirt ranks about a 1.5 on the one through ten scale of good shirt designs" and he's a pre-med major and knows not much about design.

utterly ridiculous.