Cultivating Coffee Tee
In collaboration with ROSELINE COFFEE, this spring, I am proud to announce my t-shirt design that’s now available in stores and online!
This opportunity was such an amazing experience and truly a beautiful balance of creative direction from the Roseline team and my own hand-drawn line art style.
Below, I have highlighted my process for how this Tee came to be, attached links to Roseline’s website if you’re interested in getting your very own, and some very important thank you’s at the end!
ROSELINE COFFEE started as a barista position. As I interacted with the owners more and more frequently, they began to follow my work as a line and watercolor artist, thanks to my coworkers being my biggest advocates. Portland is a hub for creatives, and while I was pursuing art seriously at the time, I hadn't expected to be received so well by impartial audiences. One of the owners asked me to commission a design for a new T-shirt. Alongside the creative direction of the Roseline team, I was asked to showcase the jasmine flower, found on blossoming coffee plants, as well as the brightly colored coffee cherries. After 3 months as a barista, here I was with the opportunity to make an enormous impact on how the entire Roseline brand would be perceived by customers, team members, and coffee connoisseurs.
I created a variety of sketches, but my primary concept directed my work; the process of hand-picking coffee cherries and the craft of bringing coffee to our cup. All of which require human cultivation, creativity, and craft. After feedback from the creative team and owners, there was a clear image of what we wanted our final product to look like.
The final product was a multi-media collaboration with me, the Roseline owners, our social media team, and Mars, who designed a previous Roseline t-shirt and taught me so much about graphic design through the entire process.
The Process:
Earliest stages:
Idea board & first sketches
Concept is solidified:
The coffee plant & human touch
Becoming a Multimedia Design with Mars Drew:
One of my favorite parts of this entire project was actually seeing one of my original sketches, specifically the time I ever drew a jasmine coffee flower, becoming the flower on the front of the t-shirt. Immediately after the sketch, I held out hope that concept would be selected.
After deciding it would be best to draw each part of the design separately, after scans, Mars combined the designs virtually and the final result was born. Inspired by a collection of graphic t-shirt ideas, I suggested the plant and hands be changed to a green color, and after some creative workshopping, we decided a vintage off-white color and fit would suit our concept best.
Thank you to Keith & Matt for giving me the opportunity to create and collaborate on this project - it was a perfect combination of artistic freedom and creative direction. Thank you to Mars Drew for teaching me and involving me in the graphic design process and being genuinely the easiest person to work with. Thank you Colin for always being so enthusiastic and kind about my designs throughout the entire project. Thank you to the team at Montgomery Park, Micheal, Rachel, and Juliana. Your constant encouragement to put my work and ideas out there and take the next steps to promote my art business was an unexpected and pivotal part of my self belief and motivation. A special thank you to my coworker and friend Ashley, for always being the first person to tell Roseline “Claire can do that.”