Designing the First RKG T-Shirt: Retry Mission Crew (Patreon)

Hello, Krupa here. 

I just wanted to do a little blog about our first T-shirt, and share some of the early drafts and the story behind the design. 

(If you’d like to pick one up, Retry Mission Crew is available from Everpress until midnight on Wednesday, June 5th.)

The original idea came about at the end of last year when we were developing the RKG and Retry logos. We were working with Ryan Quintal, a talented chap who we worked with back at IGN when we refreshed the UK Podcast logo. 

To get things rolling, he asked us to put together mood boards for the show. Anything we wanted. Anything that tapped into the show and what it’s about. Or simply things we thought looked cool.

Scout badges and NASA mission badges cropped up on a few – a one-off design commemorating an achievement and an arduous journey. It fit the bill.

My little moody mood board.

A selection of the incredible NASA mission patches.

Ryan put together this first draft, anticipating our mission to Drangleic.

Ryan's early draft for a Retry logo.

For a while we were toying with the idea of this being the Retry logo, refreshing it each season, but it became too complex. For a logo, you want something clear that can work across multiple seasons and games. So we shelved it.

When it came time to design the first T-shirt, we knew we wanted to do something with it. The  idea developed that we could use this on the back, our own mission patch, and on the front we could spoof the NASA logo.

Evolution of the front patch.

Colour variants of the mission patch with placeholder text.

Now we’re not saying launching your own company, or making a long-form Let’s Play series, is comparable to the task of landing on the moon, but I’ve had to learn about accounting. So each to their own obstacles.

We couldn’t be more happy with how it turned out. When we started back in January, it would’ve been pretty easy to have launched a series of T-shirts by uploading our logos to a website – boom, you have an entire range. But we always said we wanted to take our time and come up with something we thought was cool, something we’d be happy to wear. We also want to make sure it was printed properly, on a good quality T-shirt, too. Again, not as difficult as landing on the moon, but I think we got there.

Perfect for having a pint in.

If you’d like to pick one up, Retry Mission Crew is available from Everpress until midnight on Wednesday, June 5th. 

Krupa x