knyew: KNYEW x SKAM Collabo Tee

Thursday, June 18, 2009

KNYEW x SKAM Collabo Tee

For the last 6 weeks, I've been working on this "KNYEW x SKAM" collabo t-shirt with our designer Sean. It's been a non-stop process of re-works and last minute changes, and to our much needed relief, the t-shirt is finally done. SKAM is an artist management group that represents a bunch of premiere DJ's in the US. I (more of a mere dj than premiere) just recently signed to SKAM a couple of months ago and during a brief conversation with the owner, Sujit, he mentioned to me about designing a few SKAM t-shirts through KNYEW. I took this light inquiry and decided to make it a full blown, over the top, balls to the wall project that he and I probably regret. Anyhow, this collabo tee is definitely something me and the KNYEW boys are proud of. Our designer, Sean, went above and beyond for us and banged out one of the best t-shirts we've ever produced. As usual, our San Francisco connect, FREE GOLD WATCH, will be printing up the shirts and it'll be on American Apparel tees. Many thanks to Jon, Errol & Bo Basic at the SKAM offices for assisting us with everything. The "KNYEW x SKAM" collabo tee will be dropping Tuesday, June 30th... uno!!!

Our initial inspiration for the t-shirt came from A Tribe Called Quest's "Midnight Marauders" album cover. It was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of fitting 27 dj's into one design.

We referenced this tee from a brand called NOSSA to get an idea of how the images would fit on the shirt. They were actually one of the first brands we ever carried when we opened in 2007.

Another very important reference was our boys from FREE GOLD WATCH. Their "Knicks" tee was definitely the best executed design we've ever seen for a shirt that followed the same "Midnight Marauders" theme.

My first idea was to make the shirt a pocket tee with A Tribe Called Quest's "Lowend Theory" theme on the front and their "Midnight Marauders" theme on the back. We ended up chucking this idea and decided to stick to our original plan for a front only design.

Here's the first draft that Sean made. This rough draft helped us decide how many heads we would place on each row and where to organize everyone.

Here's a scanned image of one of Sean's many rough copies that we made changes to. It shows how we finally came up with the idea to seperate all the dj's by the city they resided in. We also finalized the idea of having every icon, next to each head, represent the person's character and/or city. The red chicken scratch is from me ;)

Here's the final draft we composed earlier this week. Free Gold Watch is finalizing the print work as we speak. These tees will be ready on June 30th...check'em out.