Chris Rudisill
Case study

Banned from Breathing

Banned from Breathing was a clothing brand I was tasked with creating in 2021. The brief was "cool art and edginess." Pretty vague, but ya gotta start somewhere. A couple of the shirts ended up as the brand's top sellers in-store.

BrandBanned from Breathing
Parent companyTechnicals and Posh
RoleGraphic Designer
Year2021
Scope NamingIdentityApparelVideo
Banned from Breathing header: the mark over a torn, grungy collage

Brand header: the mark over street-art collage

Identity

I drew up about 15 names with different logo treatments, and most of them went over well. The problem was the committee couldn't agree on one, and nobody wanted to make the call, so it landed on me. I went with a mix of street art and brutalism: bold type mashed against wild imagery, raw and jarring on purpose. The mark itself is the opposite. In all that chaos, I wanted one controlled thing to be the focal point.

Banned from Breathing wordmark
Banned from Breathing mark: crossed-out lungs in a circle
Tall in-store Banned from Breathing banner Size tags: medium, large, and extra large Printed shopping bag: yellow with hazard stripes and the wordmark Banned from Breathing display inside a store Launch post: available at all Buddha's Bazaar locations
Store banner, size tags, the printed bag, the in-store display, and the launch post

Apparel

The Charlotte skyline shirt is my favorite. It's a classic death-metal band tee, barely legible type and all, printed in blood red and white to keep costs down, which is exactly what a local band would do anyway. I grunged up a photo of the skyline, piled on some needless lightning bolts and icons, and added a few funny phrases. That shirt and the acid-brutalist "Burnout" shirt were the brand's two top sellers in the store.

Charlotte skyline tee mockup Burnout tee mockup Drug Free for Satan tee mockup Cheese tee mockup Don't Care pink tee mockup
The tees · scroll sideways
Charlotte skyline tee printed in red and white on black
Drug Free for Satan print on a white tee Cheese print on a heather tee
Charlotte, Drug Free for Satan, and Cheese, printed
Burnout launch carousel, slide 1 of 6 Burnout launch carousel, slide 2 of 6 Burnout launch carousel, slide 3 of 6 Burnout launch carousel, slide 4 of 6 Burnout launch carousel, slide 5 of 6 Burnout launch carousel, slide 6 of 6
Burnout launch carousel · 6 slides · scroll sideways

Video

I made a couple of promo videos while I was deep into learning motion graphics. "Running Man" came first and was pretty limited in scope. "Drug Free for Satan" had a clearer vibe and a lot more assets to work with. Motion is a completely different skill from graphic design, with its own learning curve: keyframes, graph editors, custom expressions.

Mannequin in the Cheese tee against a yellow wall
Running Man, Drug Free for Satan, and a styled shoot for the Cheese tee