A Shop Called Wood
Design a T-shirt range and extended media
Design a T-shirt range and extended media
This is the first brief for Advanced Communications in my final year of BA Graphics. It was a live brief given to us by the owner of Wood, a streetwear shop based in the Northern Quarter of Manchester with a second store in Huddersfield. The owner wanted to extend the shops own brand, Cyrus Wood, by creating a line of t-shirts based on the theme of the occult.
Taking inspiration from nature, demonology and numerology, I created a narrative across all of the mediums, that of The Garden of Cyrus, a legendary forest through which the Antichrist can enter our world. The campaign takes its name from a book by the 17th Century English numerologist Sir Thomas Browne on the esoteric purposes of numbers and their relation to the occult. The work itself was fractured and it is believed that he went mad whilst writing it, perhaps after gazing into the Garden itself.
Taking inspiration from nature, demonology and numerology, I created a narrative across all of the mediums, that of The Garden of Cyrus, a legendary forest through which the Antichrist can enter our world. The campaign takes its name from a book by the 17th Century English numerologist Sir Thomas Browne on the esoteric purposes of numbers and their relation to the occult. The work itself was fractured and it is believed that he went mad whilst writing it, perhaps after gazing into the Garden itself.
The grid system that forms the chaotic assemblies of triangles that runs throughout the t-shirts and its extended media was inspired by the Decad, a symbol of the ancient Greek mystic order of Pythagorean numerologists. Originally representing the number 10 in its regular form and the beauty of the Earth and Heavens, when more pieces are added to the symbol it becomes directionless and opposes its original intended purpose. This symbol is utilised as a means of opening the gap between our world and the abode of the Devil (here represented by a fox, as was common in medieval literature) and it’s minions, crawling from the Garden of Cyrus and into our woodlands and our cities.
The top 2 shirts are male bias t-shirts, while the bottom 2 are unisex. Included is a t-shirt of a crow, thought to collude with the Devil due to its wisdom. This is exploring a possible extension of the media towards other such animals with similar mystical lore associated with them.
2 photographs above issued under a creative commons licence attributed to Peter Trimming of www.geograph.org.uk
As part of the extended media required as part of expanded brief set by university, we were asked to include Double Page Spreads in a magazine of our choice. I designed mine around the format used by Vice Magazine, which is popular with the demographic and makes all of its revenue from advertising, particularly streetwear.
Representing the void between our world and the Garden of Cyrus, the symbol is the opening of the gateway at its weakest point, the mysterious woods and forests of our planet. The triangular patterns created by the grid system utilised in the t-shirts continues on throughout the double page spread and into the rest of the media.
Finally, a motion piece was designed to be included online or displayed in store. The sting runs at 20 seconds long. It starts off in a serene forest as triangles float in and out of the picture as the wood logo is revealed. However this bright imagery soon takes a turn for the sinister as the logo is replaced by the expanded Decad as the screen fades to black and the ambient forest soundtrack suddenly turns into a scene of nightmare soundscapes to herald the coming of the Devil and its minions. The tagline and the website appear for the final scenes.
