8. July 2019

Icinga T-Shirt Design

After the decision, that we needed new Icinga community shirts I took the chance to bring our apparel design to the next level and came up with multiple drafts.

Rather than having just a one time give away, I aimed for more sustainable t-shirts. We would use proper high-quality materials, full color print and colorful appealing visuals – something that our community members actually love to wear.

This is the design, we finally agreed on. The shirts are still pretty much sought after within the community. Even our team still enjoys wearing them themselves – at work and privately.

Variations

Our product manager tended more towards a simple and basic approach, so I started with simple logo placements and variations thereof.

I could have made a simple logo placement work, but I was looking for something more original.

After some ideating, I was urged to make the shirt designs more original. Since the people wearing it are pretty familiar with Icinga I tried to bring more of Icinga personality into the designs. In the end those would be the main target group that should love to wear the shirts. Wearing them should make them proud of being part of the Icinga community.

My first approach to make the design more special was to ideate with the monitoring states that is pretty central to using Icinga. Every Icinga user would know what an OK or an UP state means.

»I’m OK – approved by Icinga«: A pretty charming understatement, that makes even more sense if you know about Icinga states.
»What’s UP?«: Another variation using the monitoring states.
Warning, Critical and OK: They only made sense, if we had multiple shirts.

It also turned out pretty appealing to use the state colors combined in a more abstract way. Even if I liked the nerdiness of the »fun with states« drafts, we agreed that it would be more practical to have a more generic shirt design that also featured the logo prominently.

One variation of the final approach. On the dark shirt the colors were even more appealing.