One of my duties at Kast-A-Way Swimwear was to design generic, fun t-shirts to be sold at meets. Sometimes I would be turned loose with the design, but usually I’d be asked to emulate an older design or work within a pre-defined theme. These are the results of some of those projects:

This shirt reads “If Swimming was easy… they’d call it Volleyball.” I fought them on the grammar point, but apparently this was meant as a reference to a line of t-shirts another company made for other sports, so the boss said the “was” had to stay. This is the sort of thing that those outside sports would dismiss, but swimmers and their parents will rush to buy. The boss really did know her market.

I was given more creative leeway on this shirt than on most. This was also the first one I did as a four-color process print. This meant I could use Photoshop and do some shading instead of my usual 2- and 3-color Illustrator work. I’m really pleased with how this one came out.

For this shirt, I was given the words “Merry Swimming” and asked to come up with a Christmas design. I designed a sprig of holly using small green swim fins in place of the leaves, and I’m told it sells moderately well at December swim meets.

This was one of the last photos taken by my dying Sony Cybershot. It was starting to bleed bright whites very badly. The shirt is another 4-color process featuring penguins on a chunk of ice, parading in their jammers and goggles toward a frozen starting block. The block is carved with a 4 because the fastest swimmer in a competitive heat is generally assigned to lane 4.

I produced quite a few t-shirts and other apparel items for Kast-A-Way Swimwear. They would negotiate the rights to produce the “official” shirt for many championship meets they were vending at.

My shirt for the Ohio LSC Long Course Championships, known to insiders as “Ohio AA’s.” This was the official 2005 shirt. In my swag archive at home I have the only unsold shirt from the entire edition. This shirt was a 4-color process designed to imitate elements of a soccer shirt the boss had seen before. I did my best to make it my own.

I was waiting to get on a plane to Denver when I got the call asking me to design this shirt. I sketched it on the plane. They wanted something “classic” and we settled on an old “woody” station wagon. A surf scene was built around it because the meet organizers wanted to somehow integrate the names of every single participating team into the design. They seemed happy with how it turned out, but I was never really satisfied. It looked better on a non-yellow shirt, for one. This design was later recycled for a meet in another region. It looked better on the blue background of that merchandise.

YMCA Short Course (Winter) National Championships, 2006. They wanted a hibiscus design like they were seeing on lots of college merchandise at the time. I gave them one. There wasn’t much to do on this one except some minor permutations for things other than the shirt.

For the YMCA National Short-Course Swimming Championships of 2005, Kast-A-Way Swimwear produced a line of official merchandise. This included t-shirts, sweatshirts, tank tops, towels, tote bags, gear bags, polycarbonate water bottles, enamel pins, latex caps, commemorative bag tags, and Neptune knows what else. In addition to designing the basic logo, it was my job to coordinate customization of the art assets with folks at each manufacturer. There were dozens of combinations of file type, stroke thickness, color, size, and text to be prepared and sent around the country.

As Kast-A-Way Swimwear has expanded their business further into Guard equipment (not lifeguard, someone owns that…), they are gradually producing more of their own products. They had me design a logo to put on their KAW-branded Rescue Tube. Yes, that’s what these things are called, even though they aren’t tubes.