NMFT5 T-shirts (need some help!)
Mouse on the Keys are fascinated by architecture as evidenced in this interview. In fact their album "An Anxious Object" is a 'sonic representation of Tokyo' with each song exploring the city's residents, politics, culture and architecture. Since mouse on the keys are headlining the tour I wanted to design a t-shirt focussed on them and their love of architecture. I visualized Tokyo's buildings forming a piano and searched the net for images/graphics that came close to what I had in mind. A designer on Threadless created a T-shirt with a piano skyline. I decided I'd take this general design but make the skyline look like Tokyo's and add a mouse scurrying along top to manifest: mouse on the keys & Tokyo's architecture.
I suck at graphic design so I asked my friend Jess to breathe life into my creative vision. Unfortunately we weren't quite on the same page.
A professional designer in Vancouver then had a go at it and created a poster based on my idea. He nailed the Tokyo skyline using famous skyscrapers in Western Shinjuku... however, the buildings did not form a piano keyboard which was the crucial part of the design. Instead, he separated the keyboard from the skyline. It looks great but it's even further away from my vision compared to Jess' attempt.
So I took the Tokyo buildings from the Vancouver poster, inverted the colours, created a keyboard out of them, and added a mouse. Et voila:
Right now my friend Sheldon is working on making this into a T-shirt. He's already cleaned up my design a little bit and vectorized it.
The back's not done yet. I want to keep it simple with the NMFT vol 5 logo, the tour dates, the bands and the NMFT url. Sheldon doesn't know Japanese at all and doesn't have any Japanese fonts so I had to create something on Photoshop for him to play around with:
Sheldon's pretty busy and I'm not sure how he intends to do something stylish with the back. I have confidence in him, but there's no harm in asking people here to lend a hand in designing the back of the shirt.
So if you have some free time and would like to help design the back of the shirt with the following:
1. NMFT vol 5 2. tour dates 3. bands 4. url
that would help me out a lot. Hell, if you think you can improve on the front design with the piano skyline, go ahead with that too.
Also, to make the T-shirt design economical, please use just red, white and black as the colors.
Thanks in advance!