Design notes - This mum loves her kids - Jan 20

This mum loves her kids simplified design was part of our t-shirt design learnings that some of our first designs were too complex to work well on T-shirts. So we picked one of those more complex ideas and tried to make it simpler.
From the previous design, we reduced the word count, took out three-images (of the mum, the heart and the moon) and replaced them with one new (moon) image. We built in to the word moon, and reduced the font variation, so only MUM and MOON are in the phosphate font will the rest of the text is more uniform. This created a more balanced and aligned design.
The new moon image is a gradient shaded eclipse with a zig zag edit and simple stroke lines for the eyes and mouth.

The “This mum …” (does something) phrasing is adapted from the trend for “This girl …” or “This guy …” (does something) that is common in T-shirt designs T-shirts. Part of our market research we did ourselves.
“Loving … to the moon and back” is also common in social media. It should be familiar to our target audience.
To add some uniqueness and a little humour to the design, we added the small-print kicker phrase “even when they break stuff”.
There were other options like “even when they wake me up early”. But only works with parents of younger kids. Or “even when they stay out too late” but only works for parents with older kids. “Breaking stuff” works across any age of children, so has the broadest appeal.
We designed for black / dark background T-shirts as we’ve only have white in the portfolio so far. Black does require some stand-out colours. So we have a strong Magenta (#ff01ea) for the mums font
We also use cut-outs on the two rectangle boxes so the background t-shirt colour will come through on them to effectively add another colour on to the design.
There’s a little drop shadow to the heart and moon and added a small vector icon visual of a mum to break up the text.
We experiemented with a couple of new fonts we haven’t used before – Phosphate and Rockwell – we think these work well on T-shirt designs.

Dads shouldn’t feel left out, so we took the essence of the mum design and adapted into a more dad friendly design
The major change was a colour choice to use a vibrant blue, which was close to Deep Sky Blue colour (#01aafe). Some people don’t like the gender colour stereotypes of pink = girl and blue = boy, but it’s such an ingrained signal to most people of who things are for – and this is clearly aimed at men – we thought it worked OK.
We really like the contrast of the blue and the red in this design, they have great stand out on a black background.
The vector icon was updated to have a similar hands on hips parent pose to the mum design, but changed the dad into baseball cap, T-shirt and shorts. There’s a little ‘star’ cut-out on the T-shirt because let’s face it, most dads are stars.

In Australia and the UK, mum’s the word. But we do know there are many T-shirt fans in the US, and Stateside, MOM is definitely the word
The “U” and the “O” do take up different widths (the “U” is narrower) so there was a little bit of an adjustment required to the positioning and leading to make sure it remained aligned and well composed.

01