My friend Yulia from YWAM Kyiv asked me to design a tee shirt for their upcoming Discipleship Training School. What was supposed to be a tee shirt turned into something else entirely…
The theme for YWAM Kyiv’s first DTS since the war has started is Waves of Hope. So I started with this:
Waves of Hope Tee Concepts… Hmmm… something doesn’t feel right
I didn’t hate the tee shirts, but I didn’t want to send them to Yulia. Something didn’t feel right. After staring at them for a few days, I realized that these look way more like California than Kyiv. Research was required…
Research
I made a mood board… I collected images in my own lo-tech version of Pinterest. I started with the Ukrainian flag. Then I looked at the money. From there I went through photos of Ukrainian symbols and of Kyiv. Later, I grabbed whatever captured me or seemed like an interesting design direction.
Icons
As I was looking at as many things as possible, the scope of the job shifted for me. I didn’t want to make only a tee shirt. I wanted to create something more. I started playing with the idea of logos… I began to think of colors and type styles, and photography. One of my mood board images stood out to me and I designed a poster with a bunch of icons:
The beginning of an icon based system for YWAM Kyiv’s DTS
Posters
These icons could be combined with photos to create posters for social and physical print media
I shared the concept with Yulia and she loved it. She fixed the google-translated text, and gave great advice to refine the ideas. I’m hopeful YWAM Kyiv will begin to roll this out on social media soon and that they’ll be able to recruit many students for their DTS that begins in March.