In the fall of 2019, my boss at Evo Rock and Fitness came to me and asked if I’d like to design apparel for our route setting team. I had designed route numbering cards for our previous competition so he knew that I had design experience and that I was interested in doing more work with the gym. I was really excited on the project and already had some ideas flowing.

Right off the bat, I knew that I wanted to do some sort of design with volumes. They’re cool, geometric shapes that look cleaner than most climbing holds and are pretty recognizable within the industry. This sticker below was the first thing that I thought of and what I started out with.

After browsing some other designs online, I came up with the idea of creating the Evo logo out of these geometric volume shapes. I thought it might look cool, it would be somewhat easy to print, and as long as it was recognizable as the Evo Logo, it would work on T-shirts and Hoodies. I started out in Procreate on my iPad and drew out a basic design with the volumes inside the Evo Logo.

I was really happy with how the sketch turned out so I brought it into Illustrator to create a vector mockup of the design to submit to my boss. The volumes took a long time to design as it was a lot of repetitive work. In the end, I created a set of volume shapes and shaded each side. I then copied them into the Evo logo and arranged them so it was somewhat even and the edges were as close to the original logo as possible.

My original design of the logo was spaced out a little more and a little more abstract than the Evo logo. After submitting it to my boss, there were questions about if we were allowed to modify the Evo logo in this way. Brand identity was really important to the owners and modifying the logo in such a way was technically against their design guidelines. After discussing with the owner and some of the designers that work for the company, we were told that the design was cooler than the issues were troublesome so we got the green light. The only request was to tighten it up a bit so it fits the original logo design better. I went through and dragged some shapes and anchor points around, added some volumes in some spots, and aimed to get the outside edge of the logo to line up with the original logo as best I could.

My original design had the volume logo on the back and the Evo Rock + Fitness lettermark across the chest on the front. We were planning to get our stuff printed at a local print shop which allowed us to do seam to seam printing. If this were the case, I would have stuck with the design across the chest. However, after some discussion about costs and products, we decided to try and use an online service. One of the owners suggested RushOrderTees but I pushed hard for CustomInk because I’ve worked with them in the past. Their customer service is great and they had a really good product selection. I redid the design to just include the Evo Rock + Fitness lettermark over the left chest pocket and the volume logo and the word “setter” on the back.

The quality of products that we ordered to print on was extremely important to me. The logo was done and the design was finished but in my eyes, my work isn’t complete until we receive our products. There’s no point in having a really cool design if it’s printed on terrible quality clothes. I set up a CustomInk order with The North Face pullover hoodies and super soft Tri-Blend Next Level T-shirts. Having our design printed on The North Face hoodies would be super cool because The North Face is extremely involved in the climbing industry. The Next Level Tri-Blend T-shirts are really soft and I have a lot of blank ones that I wear everyday. The order was expensive but we convinced the owners to let us do it because we knew the quality would be good and it’s something that everyone would love to wear.

Overall I’m extremely happy with this design. I think the volume logo is really cool and a great way to combine what we do as route setters and the logo of the company we work for. The products we ordered are great and high quality and something we wear almost everyday that we work. On top of that, we got stickers made out of the design and there are talks of using it in other areas of the gym. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to work on this project and it feels even cooler to be able to walk around and wear something that I designed everyday.