objective.

Banned from Breathing is a subsidiary brand I was tasked with creating back in 2021. I was asked to create a clothing brand that had "cool art and edginess". Pretty vague, but ya gotta start somewhere.

solution.

I drew up about 15 different names with different logo styling, most of which were well-received. Thing is, the committee couldn't agree on a singular one. Votes were always split, and no one wanted to make an executive decision. So it was left up to me, and I ran with this direction.

I wanted the theme to be a mix of street art and brutalism design. Lots of bold type mish-mashed against wild imagery in a very jarring way. I think some folks call it anti-design, and I'm sure there's a ton of other names for it, but whatever it is I wanted it to be very raw and wild.

The brand mark and logotype are almost the inverse of all of that, though. In my plans for all this chaos I wanted the mark to shine through, and what better way to do that than with some stylistic contrast? Let’s try having this one controlled thing be the focal point of this visual hurricane.

apparel.

One of the coolest pieces of work I’ve done for Banned from Breathing was the Charlotte skyline graphic. It’s in the style of your classic death-metal band tee, hardly-legible typography and all. Obviously you have to go with a blood-red palette, and for the purposes of keeping print costs low I only had one other color, that being white. It was enough to sell the aesthetic I was going for, and I think on a deeper level it even mimics the process that your average local band would go through, i.e., keep everything cheap.

I used a lot of gritty techniques to grunge up a photo of the Charlotte skyline, overlaid some needless lightning bolts and icons, and wrote a few blips of funny phrases. There was a version where I had a bunch of zombies lining the bottom portion of the skyline, but (and try not to laugh) it made it a little too busy.

There are a few other pieces too, like the “Burnout” shirt seen below. That was another one in the vein of the acid/brutalism aesthetic. According to reports, these two were the top sellers of Banned from Breathing within the retail store they were sold. Pretty cool, huh?

web.

Using some very rudimentary coding, I whipped together a landing page for the brand as well. It’s not very flashy and more so acts as a “see we technically have a web page” as any brand should in this century.

My process for this kind of thing is to create a prototype within Figma, then recreate it in code later on. It helps that Figma lets you copypasta some of the CSS, but much of the placement and element behaviors need to be altered if you want stuff to be responsive. I’ve found that Figma likes to make placements for everything absolute. I wonder if there’s a way to solve that.

video.

Here are a couple of videos I created to promote the brand. The “running Man” video was the first and obviously a little limited in it’s scope. It’s still strange, but not nearly as fleshed-out as the “Drug Free for Satan” promo. I had a more solid idea for the vibe (not to mention a lot more graphic assets to work with).

This was during a time where I was heavily invested in developing my motion graphics skills. In my experience, it’s a completely different kind of skill than graphic design and also requires some intricate know-how when it comes to certain effects. Keyframing graphs and custom expressions. It’s a big learning curve, but thankfully good ol’ YouTube tutorials are always there to light the way.