About: O'Neill is originally a Californian surf wear and surfboard brand started in 1952 by Jack O'Neill. It moved down the coast from San Francisco to Santa Cruz by the end of the decade. Jack is credited to have invented the wetsuit, his son Pat the leash on the surfboard. The company logo symbolizes a breaking surf wave. "O'NEILL" and the "Wave logo" are trademarks registered worldwide.

The company produces wetsuits, performance water and snow sports inspired apparel for young adults, and lifestyle apparel. The products are distributed to 86 countries worldwide.

In 1996 O'Neill set up the O'Neill Sea Odyssey, a free, ocean-based program to educate young people about the marine environment. Over 100,000 children have participated in this program. O'Neill is involved in various other causes to help support the environment, such as through O'Neill Blue brand and marketing efforts to help promote O'Neill's mission to protect our oceans for generations to come, and minimize the impact on our planet.

The Mission: Create a recycled surfwear boardshorts capsule collection for men.

Services: Artwork design for apparel clothes > Boardshort product design > Factory and technical specification sheet > Product development and artwork info (including pantones, sizes and tech info)

Process: I am going to walk you through the full process of developing five "eco recycled"  boardshorts from zero point. Since researching competitors products, gathering ideas and trends, testing colors and textures, sketching artworks and garment features, creating art designs involving since vector based patterns through out painted image textures, gradients, stripes, etc..

I am going to show how to scale the artworks at actual size and finalize the files at the proper way to send them out to large scale suppliers around the world.

Build up technical information sheets as expected from the real industry, including garment information, fabric information, Pantone colors, sewing technics and details.

Creating mockups, placing realistic shadows, experimenting textures and finalizing files for a presentation, also to place at the tech specification files.

You will be able to see also a technical vector sheet made at real (actual) garment size to help suppliers avoid any mistakes, saving time and cost for the company.

To wrap it up we will put them all together into an overview page to make sure we are able to analise our range offer and understand opportunities to use these artworks at other kinds of garments (t-shirts, shirts, accessories, etc..) helping us to build up graphic product capsules and stories to be told at social media and digital communication.

Note: These five boardshorts were not produced by O’Neill, I have created these artworks just to show you the full process of developing eco recycled boardshorts without expose the real garments from the company.

I hope you enjoy it!

I can not say that every collection kicks in by researching competitors styles, because this is something you are always doing. Specially when you work for a company or for a specific brand, researching competitors offer and watching what people are wearing around is something you do naturally without realizing. When you are surfing you always looking what people wears to go out there, or maybe hanging out down the beach with your mates, you can’t help no watching what people like to wear.

Anyway, this is the first step when it comes to develop a full fashion collection: Put together what you like from your competitors, what you found on the internet, and what you see at your clients stores (retail stores).

Researching and collecting information and inspiration is not only very fun, but it is also very exiting to collect as more data as possible, specially nowadays that we have such good tools around the internet… But being aware the trends and seasonal colors and graphics is something essential. Above anything else, knowing your audience, who are your clients, what they like and what are their habits is even more important. It will help you to research at the right websites and the right spots, more important than anything else, it will help you to selecting and filter the best of your research and pick the right thing to use as inspiration. If you are not very familiar with the industry you are working for, building a persona for your research is crucial. However considering I have been working for the surf industry for ages I am very confident along the knowledge of my audience. See below the moldboards I have created to help me build up my color pallets and give the directions for the full atmosphere of the graphics.

Before going to the computer I always try to sketch down some ideas and write some notes, very loose and relaxed. Just help me with the initial concepts. In this case I just used a boardshort as a template. Very loose I sketched a base line, and on other layer above, I put down my ideas. But some ideas also happen on the go when you are already designing and crafting your styles. For instance the "Autumn Boardshort" that you will see along this project wasn't planned. It happened while collecting information and researching textures.

The first step was to design the garment itself. It was not a big deal for me because I already have a lot of boardshorts designed in the past and also I have a lot information about sales and performance.

But a good tip here is: once you find a good and successful garment design, including a good fit, stick to it! Then design a variety of artworks using the same garment style.

Usually I do not do that because we design boardshorts every season and we also have a long time supplier patterns. But if I am working with a new supplier or building a fresh, brand new style, I like to illustrate the garment at actual size. It can avoid mistakes and save a lot of coasts, which is very important when you are working for big apparel brands.

Very important to provide the trims colors and specifications, also product details. The Moore info you provide, the better it is.

This is the exiting time! You can make your style shine… Creating a nice artwork that works smoothly with your garment design style, I would say, is 60% to 70% of the success of your product. It should take heaps of researching and it is good to plan before you start. Getting lost around the internet, researching elements, graphics and textures is something not very difficult to happen. Below you can see my results.

I am also going to show you a little of my creative process.

I was looking for some images to give a more wintery atmosphere to the boardshort.

I found this autumn leaves beautiful image at one stock image bank.

I used the brush to take out that hard image look and give to it some organic painted texture and fell. After that I worked on photoshop to fix the edges to make it a seamless pattern for the best printing results at large scale production.

As the last step I did some color adjustments and filters to make it with dark earth tones and reach a colder atmosphere, perfect for an inter-seasanol piece of garment.

I can not deny that stripes are in general the best selling garment pieces of most of the collections (all over the world). When you are designing an apparel collection, does not matter if it is a big collection or just a small apparel capsule, you can not afford to not having a very nice and commercial striped garment.

For this one, on top of using the very thin pin stripes I also put a blue and nice textured gradient on the back of the stripes, reaching a nice feathering fell that the stripes could blend into the blue color when it gets lighter and lighter.

I was looking for a floral that I could reach a very nice and contrasting color combination.

I found these flowers with some beautiful magenta and yellow colors that would look incredible on a dark background.

First step was to search on internet to find some other flowers as reference. I put them all together, resized and made a photo manipulation to combine properly the different flowers. Once I reached a cool positioning, with the brush I gave to it some nice brush strokes blending better the colors and eliminating hard edges and image texture. Put it on a black background and made it a seamless pattern.

Not much to say folks! The famous and incredible solid black piece of trunks. It can’t miss in any closet.

Usually for a more adult and mature audience, it is always a must have for any collection or store. Easy to combine with any other kind of t-shirt.

Raising the power of Neptune god, the trident is and will always be a fantastic sea symbol for any kind of beach / surfing theme. For this garment we reduced its size to a mini pattern and used a contraste white color to combine naturally with two tones of blue. Easy to wear with a solid basic t-shirt or even just for surfing out there.

Below you can see a speed video showing my computer creation process of the Sea Stripes boardshort in 10 minutes. I hope you enjoy it!