Reinventing a Fraternity T-Shirt

Using Word Maps as Art

In the Spring 2019 Semester, I pledged the service Fraternity APhiO. We needed a pledge class t-shirt so I decided to try and come up with a design.

My requirements were:

• To include all 40 names of my pledge brothers
• To include all 10 names of the officers that ran pledging
• And to stick to the theme of the semester, “Nicki Fox.”

One of my main concerns with shirts like this one was how bland and rigid the back usually was. Since you needed to include the names of every single person within the group on it, other fraternities and organizations would usually stick with regular columned lists of every single name. Albeit easy to implement, they would usually turn out like this:

Most of the time, you can’t even read the names of everyone and the layout would look super cramped.

When I was brainstorming ideas, I was trying to think ways in which I could make the back of the shirt more aesthetically pleasing while also allowing people to distinguish the names more easily.

When people are looking at shirts like these, they usually are not reading the names but are rather seeing them from far away where the overall shape of the names matters more.

How can I make the shape of the names look good while also maintaining the integrity of the letters themselves?

An idea casually occurred to me,

What If I used the words as art?

This way, the back could be used as an artistic piece, but, upon closer inspection, the names would still be readable. It would have taken too much time and work to use illustrator and shape every single name into an art piece so I decided to use a word map generator.

As for the shape of the art piece, I chose a Fox because I felt like it would be a great tribute towards our namesake, “Nicki Fox.” After a few iterations of what type of fox shape I wanted and what colors worked the best, the final T-shirt came out quite nice:

Here is a more detailed look at the fox:

I decided to make the officers’ names stand out more by using size and color. As they make up the spine of the Fox, it is akin to how they led us through the pledging process and helped to support us.

This design ended up winning and it was great to see everyone wearing it :)

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!