Each week we’ll talk about some of the inspiration behind our neighborhood series designs. We started this series in early 2017 because we wanted people to have a greater connection to home.  Being able to rep your city is huge, and going block by block would be a near impossible task with all of the streets in The Bronx, so being able to create designs that could remind people of the neighborhood they grew up in (or are currently living in) was a huge goal of ours.

Our initial in-house design approach has been to have designs reduced to 1 or 2 colors.  For us, being able to communicate a feeling with the least amount of colors let’s us know that the design is doing the heavy lifting rather than the colors immediately invoking a certain emotion.  It also allows us to either remix the design or have different colorways, with the tees, hoodies and sweatshirts serving as the canvas for the artwork as well as the color of the garment itself giving some depth to the piece.  This, however, does not factor into our collaborations.  For collabs, the artists we work with drive the design process, and we’ll tweak elements here and there but won’t keep an artist from representing themselves through color.

This week, we’re talking about City Island, home to the best seafood in NYC, I don’t care what anyone says.

This week we’re talking about our City Island design.  This is the perfect example of our design approach. First, it’s a one color design and the tee color serves as an accent color.  The lines are thick and bold and both the text and illustrations match in thickness.  The text is decorative  and gives me the feeling of a wave or sail.  We used this font to pay homage to the nautical feeling of City Island.  There’s so many boats and yachts along the shore you almost forget you’re in The Bronx.