Early in 2007 was when the first Crunk for Cancer was held, just shortly after my friend, Sam Marx, was diagnosed with cancer. His sister, Hannah Marx, who was living in our house at the time decided to throw a party to raise awareness. Since we are now current residents of the house, we felt like we had to do something for his 21st birthday and to celebrate his life.
I took it upon myself for a personal project. I decided to design a t-shirt to sell for the party and the proceeds would go to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation which was a foundation that Sam was deeply devoted too.
This was the first rough for the t-shirt. The fro on the ‘C’ was Sam Marx’s trademark. I ditched this idea because my initial idea for the t-shirt was to be clean and bold. The type was Helvetica and I felt like it didn’t flood or cover enough area on the t-shirt. Plus the fro illustration, I believed, was too cartoony and I felt it ruined the overall design. Plus since I had “in memory of sam marx” on the bottom, I felt it would of been redundant to have a fro to represent Sam Marx.
This was my final idea for the t-shirt. The type was changed to Futura, since the type characteristics were elongated and covered the area nicely. Also, having the words broken up gave a little more emphasis and boldness to each word. I also believe it reads easily.
This was my first time mass producing t-shirts and my first time with screen printing. I took some classes before, but this was my first time on my own. I had a lot of trial and error in the process. My first problems was with the emulsion, it was either I applied too much or too little. The next and BIGGEST problem I had was with cleaning the emulsion out of the screen. I didn’t have a high-pressured hose to easily wash it out, so I had to use a standard home hose and put my finger over the opening to apply more pressure.
Some areas didn’t come out which left a grungy texture to the final print. Which I was okay with. At this point, I was pretty much tired of cleaning and re-exposing screens, but I was satisfied since the “in memory of sam marx” came out pretty clean on the final print.
I initially wanted to print on a dark navy t-shirt, but the ink I purchased would steep into the shirt and leave a translucent texture to the type. So I was left with a plain white shirt, which was fine since the white t-shirts costed less than the colored shirts. The design in the picture above was another design I scrapped due to the fact that it didn’t cover the area enough.
After MANY trial and errors and frustration, this was the final design. If anyone asks, the distorted look on the type was intentional.
Another quirk to this shirt, was that the ink glowed in the dark. Many people were very excited for this, solely because it glowed in the dark.
Overall, the project was VERY time consuming, but I felt like it paid off in the end. If I was asked to do this again for next year, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Counting the 100+ shirts sold and the profits from the party, we raised over 1,000 for St. Baldrick’s. It blew all our expectations away, and I really am happy with the outcome.