In May 2021 my friend Scott Finholm asked me to design a T-shirt for a fun run. The Seattle "Beat the Bridge" race — the big annual fundraiser for JDRF, now Breakthrough T1D — could not run normally that year, so his group organised a neighborhood version and called it Beat the Ridge. The team was Team Brynn and Lauren. Brynn is a friend's daughter living with Type 1 Diabetes, and the money went to research.
The brief had one hard requirement that decided the whole design. Brynn picked the words. Not a theme, not a color, the actual vocabulary: smart, artistic, brave, tremendous, intelligent, rad, invincible, and a line that anchors the rest — illness does not define me. My job was to build something that let a dozen-odd affirmations chosen by a kid carry the shirt without turning into a motivational poster.
A word cloud was the obvious structure and the risky one, because word clouds usually read as filler. What keeps this one from collapsing is that it is not random. The words are set on a strict horizontal and vertical grid in a cross formation, so the eye reads in rows rather than hunting around the shirt, and the color runs a deliberate spectrum from red at the left edge through orange, yellow, green, and blue to violet at the right. The rainbow is doing structural work, not decoration — it gives the block a direction to be read in and keeps thirty-odd words from flattening into noise.
Weight and style carry the hierarchy. The affirmations shift between bold, light, italic, and vertical settings so no two neighbours look alike, which is what stops the grid from reading as a spreadsheet. "Illness does not define me" runs full width directly under the title, in italic, as the one line that gets the whole row to itself. "Team Brynn and Lauren" sits immediately beneath the wordmark in plain capitals, because the shirt needed to say who was running before it said anything else.
The title itself is the only piece of drawn lettering — an outlined retro slab with a hard drop shadow, deliberately at odds with the clean sans around it so it reads as a mark rather than another entry in the cloud. The first pass gave it a thinner outline and a softer shadow, and it lost the fight with the surrounding color. I thickened both for the final so it would hold on fabric, where ink spread and a textured heather ground both work against fine detail.
I converted all the type to outlines and delivered vector AI and EPS with PNG and JPG rasters, sized for chest placement, so Shoes n Feet could print without font substitution. The shirts were printed and worn at the run.
