Caviar Gold is a Washington cannabis brand selling infused pre-rolls and accessories. In early 2015 they had a collaboration going with Redman and wanted a shirt out of it. The whole job ran a week, from sourcing reference on January 29 to the packaged file on February 5.
Two of the three elements were not mine to draw, and it is worth being clear about that. The tag reading REDMAN is the artist's own existing logo. The portrait is traced from a photograph by Jason Goodrich — I built it as a vector illustration, reducing the photo to flat shapes that would survive a screen print, but the pose, the lighting and the crown are his picture. What I contributed was the vector work, the colour, the composition, and the one structural idea the shirt turns on.
That idea took four passes to find, and the problem was the client's logo. A collaboration shirt has to carry two names, and the second name is always the awkward one — too small and the brand paid for nothing, too large and it stops being a Redman shirt anyone would wear.
The first pass ignored the problem and went for atmosphere: the entire illustration in one olive-gold ink, tag included, on a gold panel, with a "CaviGold Records" credit set in beside the head. It was cohesive and it was dead. Everything sat at the same value, so the face had no more presence than the background, and the credit line read like a watermark.
The second pass split it. Portrait to greyscale with a white crown, tag to red. Now the artist's name came forward off the picture and the face had contrast to work with. But the client credit was still text parked next to a head.
The third pass tried the laurel roundel top right, and that is the version that made the answer obvious by being wrong. Placed in the corner, the mark reads as a sticker somebody applied over the artwork — it belongs to the shirt, not to the picture.
So in the fourth pass I moved it onto the chain. Redman is already wearing two of them; the Caviar Gold laurel became the pendant hanging at the bottom, in gold, the only gold left in the design. It stopped being a logo placed on the artwork and became something the subject was wearing. The brand gets the strongest position on the shirt — dead centre, at the bottom of the two lines your eye already follows down — and it does not fight the portrait to get it. The credit text came out and the backing panel opened up to white.
I delivered on February 5 as a 720 by 1440 pixel CMYK Illustrator file, everything outlined, no fonts and no linked images, so nothing could substitute or go missing at the printer.
Four years later, in May 2019, the design was revised. The Caviar Gold medallion came off, the chains were recoloured gold, and a small gold repeat of the tag went in at the hem. The result is a clean shirt and, from a branding point of view, a strange one: the thing the whole composition had been rebuilt to accommodate was removed, leaving no client mark anywhere on it. I do not have a record of what either version sold. The garment images here are mockups I built to present the work.
