Neighborhood Series: Morris Park
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.
Every neighborhood in The Bronx is different and our designs try capture a piece of each neighborhood’s culture. We hope each design instills pride of home!
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.
About Our Design: Morris Park
This week, we’re looking at the “Morris Park” design. It’s one of the newest in-house designs of The Bronx Brand.
Morris Park has a special significance for The Bronx Brand as one of the co-founders, Mike, grew up there. For Mike, Morris Park is associated with pizza, summer icees, Italian festivities, and chilling in the park. It’s home for Mike and he wanted to capture that sense of childhood excitement. The inspiration for this Morris Park design is, of course, the iconic Marino’s Italian Icees logo. The type is mimicked off of the typeface used in the Marino’s logo and includes a tail coming off of the S, inspired by summer league teams.
This design is also only available in two colorways: vintage white and black. We did not want to over complicate the simplicity of the type by muddling the design with colors and offer it in universal staples that will work for everyone. The tail of Morris includes the word “PARK” as a text mask which allows the shirt to come through.
What do you think of this design? What colorways or other garments should we print this on? Let us know in the comments below.
