Every Cycling Kit I’ve Designed (The Not-Terrible Ones, Anyway).
As a lifelong cyclist, mainly as a competitive road racer, it was designing cycling kit for Edmonton Road and Track Club (ERTC), that lead me into a career as a designer. I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought I had a good sense of style, and designed a wordmark for ERTC in MS Paint.
The kit supplier—Vancouver-based Sugoi—would only accept vector-based artwork. So off I went to the University of Alberta Bookstore to buy a copy of Adobe Illustrator 8.0 on CD. From there, I churned out a pretty tepid kit (when I look back on it now) but I liked it at the time, and so did my teammates. Huge Canadian flag on the chest? Massive logos everywhere? Check and check. I’ll endeavour to post the design here, once I liberate the working files from the CD they reside on.
I still love designing cycling kit, a sub-speciality to the visual branding projects that I’m focussed on, but doing so is a deceptively tough design brief. It’s hard to predict what the client or end user will like. The ask is that you design something visually interesting, looks good on all genders, flattering, distinctive and unique. It’s dressing everyone the same, while all those people have different tastes of what looks good.
These days I like to pick and choose who I design kit for; my own racing club, unique rides or good causes or even a certain national team (excited to share more on this in the coming months) usually are enough to motivate me to create something unique and memorable.
