By Full Sail, For Full Sail Look Book

In October 2020, I was a part of a PPX Port Blend project led by Eleni Bandy to create a new line of merchandise to propose to the campus' merch store, The Hangr. I pitched the idea of creating a lookbook to house the designs and became responsible for that aspect of the project.

The concept was to create a collection of pieces designed by students, for students, that we would actually want to wear. So we had weekly meetings where we would do progress updates and plan out our next steps, but the first part of the process was pretty independent.

The Breakdown of the Month:

Week One - Create Sketches and Designs

Week Two - Finalize Designs in Illustrator

Week Three - On-Campus Photo Shoot to Create Custom Mockups + Mockup Creation

Week Four - Create a Look Book and Give a Portfolio Presentation

Week Five - Poll the Students and Faculty to See What Pieces People Actually Wanted

Week Six - Create a Pitch Deck + Contact the Team Responsible for Creating the Clothing

Week One

I did my initial concept sketches in Procreate and Canva to get my ideas out there and think about more concepts, not quality because I could develop the best and favorite ideas into something I'd fully design after the brainstorming session. During one of our early meetings, the concept of designing masks for campus came up, so we each were tasked to create a mask as one of our designs, meanwhile, the rest could be anything we'd like to create. Going into the process, I knew I wanted to design a pair of leggings and a cropped hoodie, but other than that I didn't want to limit myself.

Week Two

In week two, we presented our ideas in the next team meeting and came up with the concept of the pieces fitting into the main groups of collegiate and retro to help guide us into the next step of creating and finalizing our designs. Over the course of the week, I translated my designs into Illustrator to create SVG files.

I ended up creating looks for MCBS only students, referencing things such as House Cup, as well as, designs that can be applied or customized to a variety of majors.

Week Three

During Week Three, the students who were near campus gathered and safely did a photoshoot led by Jared Patrick with blank clothes that we could use to edit our designs onto for mockups. Later that week, we were able to create our individual mockups for our best designs and then upload them all to Google Drive where I could download them to create the lookbook in Week Four.

Week Four

At the end of the PPX month, I was able to gather everyone's designs to create the first draft of the lookbook called Collegiate Colors. I edited together a few mockups with different people's work for the cover images and used images I'd taken on campus to split up the different designer's work. Finally, I requested summary paragraphs from the designers to showcase alongside their respective work and this is what I came up with.

Week Five

After the month concluded, we conducted a poll to refine the number of pieces in the line to go to the Hangr with only the strongest and most-wanted pieces of the initial book. After receiving over 80+ answers in a few days, we had another meeting to decide which ones would be in the final lookbook based on the poll results.

We also got feedback and guidance from the university's creative agency, Platinum Creative to start to answer questions we would probably face when pitching the line. Also, we changed the collection title to "By Full Sail, For Full Sail".

Here is a look at the refined, final look book I created.

Week Six

We wrapped up the project by putting together a pitch deck explaining the concept of the line and our hopes for it to be a reoccurring thing for students of all programs to have access to. We hoped that the students would have the opportunity to get paid for their work and gain experience for their portfolio, or even to earn a scholarship award for their participation. We also saw this as a way to bring together campus and online students when the pandemic was over.

After reaching out to the Hangr a few times over the course of November to March, we are still awaiting a response, but maybe someday you will see some future Full Sailors rocking these pieces