Cavigold Records is the label arm of Caviar Gold, run out of Seattle. Directly after the Redman collaboration shirt I carried on with them through February and March 2015 on label merchandise and promo, which came to three pieces: a graphic to push a video, a chest crest, and a shirt for the roster.
The promo graphic was the smallest job and the one I like most. It had to get people to a YouTube video, and rather than write a sentence I set it out as arithmetic — the red Redman tag, a plus sign, the Caviar Gold laurel, an equals sign, and the URL as the answer. Two logos most of the audience already recognised, one operator between them, and the position of the link makes the claim: this collaboration produced something, and here it is. No copy to read and nothing to translate.
The crest was a reduction problem. The collaboration artwork was a full-torso print, and the label wanted something wearable at left-chest scale, which is a different piece of design rather than the same one scaled down. Cropping the portrait would have lost the crown, and the crown is what makes the picture. So I kept the crowned head and dropped everything else, then set it inside the Caviar Gold laurel wreath with the wordmark below. The wreath does the work the shoulders used to — it gives the head an enclosure so it reads as an emblem rather than a floating cutout, and at that size the silhouette of crown-inside-wreath is legible even when the face is not.
I tested it on five garments: black, charcoal, navy, brown and cigar. Black won on contrast and it was not close. The badge relies on cream and gold against a dark ground, so charcoal immediately costs the crown its separation, and brown swallows the darker tones inside the face. Navy was the informative failure — a cool ground drags gold toward green, and the whole palette is warm. Cigar, the darkest brown, was the only earth tone that came close to holding.
The roster shirt was the last piece and the most conventional, which is the point — a label roster print has a form and fighting it helps nobody. The crest sits at the top: a distressed shield with CAVIGOLD in condensed blackletter over Records, a die-cut ribbon carrying SEATTLE, WA., an est. 2012 line, a cut-gem shape at the point, and fine sunburst rays behind to lift it off the cloth. Under it go thirteen acts, Redman and Crooked I and Layzie Bone among them.
The decision worth explaining there is the type direction. Set the names horizontally and thirteen lines of varying length make a ragged paragraph you have to read. Set them vertically and stepped by length, and they resolve into a wedge that tapers to a point below the crest — so the block becomes a shape first and a list second, the crest keeps its authority at the top, and the whole print reads at a distance before a single name is legible. Which is the correct order for a shirt.
I have no record of the print quantities or the sales.
