Every year since 1973, Westport has hosted the KC St. Patrick’s Day Parade, closing roads to make room for parade watchers, outdoor beer gardens, sidewalk cafes, and a whole host of St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans.

T-Shirt Design

In celebration and anticipation of the event, Westport Regional Business League needed a St. Patrick’s Day t-shirt design. They would sell the t-shirts at local retailers and other stored within the Westport Regional Business League leading up to the event, as well as during the parade on March 17th.

As always, I started with sketching out some ideas. After reviewing initial ideas with the client, I discovered I would not be able to use beer or alcohol in my design as the client felt it would unfairly promote their bars above their other tenants.

I explored various executions on shamrocks as well as vintage and brutalist design executions, a style that was popular and high-selling at the time. I created many design options for this project, trying to find the one that would best represent Westport, Kansas City, St. Patrick’s Day, and still be able to be sold year after year.

Final Design

The other design styles that were selling at the time, were extremely minimalist, brutalist, or vintage. I explored all three styles, but felt most drawn to the human-appeal of the vintage letterpress and hand-lettered style. The “Westp-rt” portion was in a nice vintage typeface that fit with the rest of the Westport Regional Business League’s branding. The shamrock, though simple, had a nice playful tilt to it that made it charming, and the text contained within the shamrock was a monoline script, so easy-to-read, but had a hand-lettered quality, using glyphs to best serve “Charming,” “Kansas,” and “City”.

The shirt sells at The Bunker, a local trend-setting retailer in the Westport area of Kansas City, during the month leading up to March 17th.