AICF T-shirts

2009 Numbers of Hope Shirt

In 2009, one of the AICF pastors asked me to make some t-shirt designs to get printed to sell to church members and at the bi-annual church bazaar to help raise money for missions. He gave me a breakdown of what he wanted and I got to work:

  1. Front: The numbers 3:16 with nails as the colon + “The Numbers of Hope”
  2. Back: John 3:16 in the shape of a cross

This was the FIRST t-shirt design I’d made, so I wasn’t sure right away how they would be printed. I ended up creating two designs on 3 colors of shirt (white, red, and blue – of which we chose to print on every color):

  1. Design 1: Included a splintered, rugged cross image – difficult to print
  2. Design 2: I changed everything to vector shapes in black – only the nails were colored differently

It was only later when browsing a bookstore in Korea that I found Max Lucado had a book out with almost the same design. I felt good about how closely the two matched WITHOUT my referencing his book design at all. I was particularly interested in the fact that the two designs BOTH used Trajan Pro for the 3:16 numbers font.

2011 Been Set Free Shirt

In 2011, shortly after becoming debt free himself, the same pastor asked me to create another shirt design called “Being Set Free.” His guidelines were:

  1. Front: Show 2 hands grasping and breaking chains – the cross at the center, with the text “Been set free” and a reference to Romans 6:22
  2. Back: Create a list of words of things we are “set free” from
  3. Sleeve: Create some kind of AICF circular logo to fit on the sleeve

chains-shirt-front

The first design I came up with (above) was a bit too grungy and the hands were in the wrong position (he wanted them to look a bit more like fists with the chains wrapped AROUND the hands). Additionally, I misunderstood that he wanted the text to say “Being set free” rather than “Been set free.” I fixed those problems in subsequent designs and gave him a choice between a number of different fonts.

We went with the fourth design with lowercase “been set” text and printed the shirts with the NEW AICF circular logo on the sleeve. This was the FIRST circular design for the AICF logo.

Click here to see how the AICF logo has transitioned over the years →

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