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.

We create designs to remind people of the neighborhood they grew up in, or are currently living in.

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 reviewing our Castle Hill and Soundview designs.

Both are in-house designs and since we had a similar approach with these two designs, it makes sense to review them both. For each, we chose to stick with a one color and primarily font based. For the Castle Hill design, I was thinking of Castlevania and Monster Mash. I’m not sure why but that was in my head. The font gives me a Frankenstein, ripped and put together kind of vibe, and is why we used it for Castle Hill. Since Castle Hill and Soundview share the same peninsula in the Bronx, the Soundview design actually uses the same font as the Castle Hill design but it’s filled in and bold.