Last Sunday, MotorMavens’ Antonio Alvendia hit me up with a brilliant opportunity for both of our brands to collaborate for the upcoming 86FEST. Unlike your typical car event, Antonio pitched me the idea of creating a typography based tee influenced by the artistry of Fitted Life, conceptualize by the spirit of MotorMavens, and inspired by the old school passages of hip hop. Drawing inspiration from hip hop legends Eric B. & Rakim, the idea was to use the lyric line “No tricks in 86, it’s time to build.” The reference would pay homage to hip hop and the fundamental crew of 86 enthusiast from past to present.


With 86FEST starting one week from the time we began collaborating, I knew this would be one of craziest design challenges I’ve ever taken due to time constraints. Usually when it comes to designing tees, there’s a lot of preparation involved. There’s ideas to be sketched out, revisions, details, and other important aspects that usually takes anywhere from 3 months to a year, depending on how big the project is. So with a 5 day deadline, I knew I would be putting in tons of creative work.

As a designer and an artist, I have this thing against relying on prebuilt fonts as I feel like it kills an artist’ personality. I know designing things from scratch isn’t for everyone, but for us, it’s the perfect workflow that exhibits our skills as designers and artists. So for this design, I stuck with our motives and drew out a collection of types that I thought would work best for the overall design.


That Sunday I created a variety of layouts and custom lettering which became the base of the final design. Taking certain elements from each design that I drew, Antonio pieced together a rough draft for the 86FEST tee that I spotted Monday morning. Throughout Monday, I did another design pass and translated his rough draft into a working canvas. By that night, we had a great concept drawing to start translating from sketch to vector in Adobe Illustrator.


Fast forward to Tuesday night, I finalize the drawing into Illustrator and gave it another design revision with input from Antonio. There were certain aspects we wanted to accentuate and balance out in the overall design. Some line weights were lightened up and spacing was adjusted accordingly to improve the overall design. After a bit more tinkering, the design was finalized Wednesday marking our design completion record for 4 days.


So here is the final tee that will be available at 86FEST this Sunday October 7, 2012. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make this event, but be sure to swing by and cop this fresh collaboration between MotorMavens x Fitted Life. So stoked to share this art piece with you all!

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