Scared Panda

Design: The Evolution Of The Nordic Walleye T-Shirt

We just dropped our first “Vikings” themed t-shirt called Nordic Walleye. Over the past couple months we’ve been working with Minneapolis Artist MJ Heubach on the perfect combination of viking and walleye. I think we nailed it.

During the design process a lot of ideas come and go. We work with amazing artists and rely on their creativity so the original idea Katie and I come up with usually goes through a few changes throughout the whole process. Here we wanted to show you how we created the Nordic Walleye design with MJ. When we start the design process, Katie and I send a creative brief to the artist that describes - in as much detail possible - what we’re thinking for each design. Sometimes what’s in my head doesn’t come out very clear and there is some back and forth to hammer out the details - to all the artists who work with us; I’m sorry. However, on this design we were on the same wave length with MJ and he delivered his first draft basically exactly as I had imagined it. As you can see, the first draft is usually a simple sketch of the design to show the general direction. In the first round of the Nordic Walleye MJ originally included the mustache of the viking but we decided to get rid of it after realizing our walleye looked like it was morphing into a catfish. In the next round MJ added more details to the walleye like scales, definition around the eyes and more detail to the fins. That was all that was needed. The next step was to add in the colors.

We wanted to keep the shirt colors simple with two colors - yellow and white - this allowed the shirt color to work itself into the design and act as the third color. There ya have it. This is the evolution of an idea of a viking walleye into a full blown t-shirt design. Both the crew neck and v-neck cuts are available now on our online shop.