Stars And Bolts
Stars And Bolts is one of those projects that began very innocently as a fun project but quickly evolved into something way cooler than I could have ever envisioned.
The project began innocently enough while I was noodling around in Illustrator one day with the City of Buffalo flag logo. I love the logo, but I thought it could be simplified a bit – it gets very busy when resized to smaller sizes and thought I could find something better to put in that middle circle.
I kept the outer border (the titular “stars and bolts”) and put a clean Buffalo vector in the middle circle. I patted myself on the shoulder, closed Illustrator, and promptly forgot about the logo for about a year while it sat in my projects folder on my Macbook.
A year or so later, while working on some hockey jersey design concepts, I was browsing my random ideas folder and came across the Buffalo logo. I immediately put it in the jersey PSD I was working on a built a design around it. The original was a bit more bold and carried over some of the stars and bolts elements onto the sleeves. A revision I’d created was a bit more classic in nature.
Just for fun, I posted the jersey design on Twitter and it immediately started to gain some traction. Among the folks who saw it were the guys who run 26 Shirts, a charity organization in Buffalo that prints limited edition t-shirts every two weeks, with the proceeds going to help a different cause every two weeks.
The guys loved my design and got in touch about wanting to print it on shirts. The idea was fast-tracked and was made available for purchase within a few weeks, modeled by Buffalo native and recent Women’s Olympic Hockey Gold Medalist Emily Pfalzer on the 26 Shirts various social media accounts.
The shirt design sold incredibly well and has been featured several times on the 26 Shirts social media accounts by happy customers proudly representing! I never tire of seeing people enjoy my work.
My wife surprised me for Christmas with the opportunity to create my own hockey jersey from one of my designs. As an avid hockey jersey collector, I jumped at the chance! I immediately picked the Stars And Bolts design as it was near and dear to my heart, and something I would love to be able to wear.
I worked closely with a professional hockey jersey manufacturer and customizer to make sure that every detail came out exactly as I’d envisioned, and I’m so happy to say it did! Complete with a fully-embroidered crest and pro-level name and number customization, I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect way for this little logo project to come full circle!
