It's been a little over a month since we launched our BCisAwesome.com online t-shirt store. In that time we've seen a bunch of designs fly out the door (our A&B Sound, EXPO 86 and Luvafair ones are our greatest hits) and we've seen just as many land with a thud.
Below are the 5 worst ones we've released, starting with the least bad of the bad and ending in the most terrible one. As the creative director and lead of this project all of these failures - including the most colossal one - are on me.
Nanaimo, Home of Frank Ney T-shirt available at bcisawesome.com
This poorly designed t-shirt (I did the graphic) is celebrating the spirit of Nanaimo's increible "pirate mayor", the late Frank Ney. He was wild and fun and full of pizzaz, which is not the way you might describe this lifeless design. I'm sorry, Frank. HERE is a documentary we produced which does a better job of telling your story.
Official Squatcho T-shirt available from bcisawesome.com
This one was meant to be a terrible design. It's a parody of the bootlegged Olympics gear that was in the news back in 2010. I showed it to a friend of mine who did graphic design for the Games and he said "Oh dude, that's bad". It was meant to provoke a laugh or two, and it did: a mere two people have purchased it.
Peter Pine T-shirt available from bcisawesome.com
Peter Pine is actually the official mascot of the town of Princeton, B.C.. He's on their flag, and I wanted to update him for 2018 as the old version is... well... dated. Our design has so far failed to resonate (we sold one unit of it so far), and it's got me thinking of taking the character and turning it into a giant weed leaf.
Ed the Elephant T-shirt from bcisawesome.com
This one actually makes me a little sad. It's a decent design, and Ed's is one of the greatest stories to ever come out of Cranbrook. I'm still holding out hope that it's not as terrible of a shirt that sales of it would lead me to believe. Maybe we need to start reaching further into the Kootenays with our marketing before we throw it out.
Free Meng Wanzhou T-shirt from bcisawesome.com
Free Meng Wanzhou
While a pretty decent t-shirt from a graphic design standpoint, this one created a lot of controversy this week. Not to distance myself too far from it but it was conceived over a meal by a few people (not my idea, though I did the design of it and am responsible for it going up for sale), and we thought it would be funny. It either went right over people's heads or they were outraged; there wasn't much inbetween on this one, although we did sell 3 shirts. It was a mistake to release it - as was the followup FREE KOVRIG design- and we're sorry. We've pulled the design and will donate 100% of the proceeds we made off of it to charity.
You can look forward to more very-Vancouver and B.C. shirts in the coming weeks and months ahead. Some may be controversial and some may be full-on duds, but for the most part we're on course to deliver some great nostalgia, local pride and stories about this great province of ours.
Have a look at all of our t-shirts at bcisawesome.com.
