I worked with Channing Copper on assorted brand design needs, including icon sets, evolving the logo and brand guidelines, email templates, business cards, brochure, retouching, and branded work wear & accessories. As a design generalist with a broad skill set, I love working with small companies that allow for this kind of variety.

What I’d like to highlight in this post was the thought which went into the branded work wear & accessories. I was grateful for the opportunity to work with a client with aligned values around sustainability and physical goods.

As a designer of physical goods as a maker, I prioritize end of life and longevity in my design choices. Cotton, while more resource intensive to grow, does not have the health implications and end of life ecotoxicity of polyester and petro-based fibers. I also try to create only what is truly needed, and am on a mission to avoid creating swag whenever possible. Swag can be done thoughtfully as a special gift which adds value and longevity, like we did at Instructables. However more often it’s created as a cheap giveaway, and is likely to have a very short life before heading straight to landfill.

For Channing Copper, we only did a short run of work wear for the employees. First, I tried to find ways to avoid using virgin fiber, but that wasn’t possible this time around. Lots of shirts on exist on ebay, but finding the right size range is a challenge. We explored some promising options like Everywhere Apparel (recycled cotton blanks), but they didn’t fit our needs. In the end, we opted for 100% organic cotton shirts, and conventionally grown cotton aprons and sew in labels. I also used Good on You to navigate the plethora of tshirt blank brands out there for those that had the best social and environmental practices. By having the logo be subtle and small, the shirt is more likely to have a longer life a simple basic.

All collateral was printed by the fine people at Greenerprinter.