Image depicting a hoodie mockup with a floral motive edited to look like an organisation logo.

Mockup of a hoodie with the winning design.

Overview

Floral hoodie designed as a competition entry for the Student Council of Faculty of Humanities at AGH University of Cracow was first released in Spring of 2024 with continuations planned in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025.

Project requirements

The faculty set up plain rules:

  1. The design must be unique.
  2. The design must indicate the connection to the Faculty of Humanities.
  3. The design must be a vector that could be uploaded to a machine embroider.

The competition took place in April 2024.

Design process

Research

Being a student and understanding the characteristics of the Faculty and its staff made me realise that the best approach would be to design something that would be a spinoff of past initiatives and events that took place at the University.
I browsed both through official Social Media of the Faculty and talked to stakeholders (both staff and students) about what they liked about their university. My findings were:

  1. The design should resemble the official logo of the faculty, which is a signet that looks like a mix of a hand and an electrical circuit, alongside the full name of the organisation.
  2. The design should use floral motifs that would connect it to the upcoming series of events taking place at AGH University of Science.
  3. The design should use not only the faculty initials but also the university name.

Ideation

Having all the necessary data in mind, I started scribbling on a blackboard. I decided to put all possible ideas together and eliminate them one by one based on the possibility to embroider them. There were two finalists that I decided to visualise using Generative AI.

AI generated image of the logo of Faculty of Humanities AGH but in the form of an embroidered plant leaf.

AI generated logo of the faculty resembling an embroidered plant leaf.

AI generated image that could be generated using this prompt: Design a minimalistic floral motif by subtly integrating the uploaded logo with its hand and circuit elements. The fingers of the hand could be imagined.

AI generated figure of a hand grasping a plant.

The final idea was a mix of the two depictions above. I decided to create a shape from the original signet of the faculty logo like in the first image and fill it with leaves like in the second image. I decided to use free plant assets available online that could be commercially used without attribution.

Finalisation

The final design process was short with only a few variants.

  • The first approach was to make the logo shape filled to maximum capacity, which was dropped due to potential limitations of the embroidery machine.
  • The second approach was dropped due to low recognizability of the logo.
  • The third design used the Polish slogan of the faculty (Behind every technology there is a human who created it.) but was dropped due to reading difficulties on smaller hoodies.
First hoodie design attempt.

First approach.

Second hoodie design attempt.

Second approach.

Third hoodie design attempt.

Third approach.

The last and final design, that won the competition, was similar to the third approach with the lower text dropped. The font used to write the faculty and university initials was chosen so that it would resemble university wear often used by colleges across the USA.

Final hoodie design.

Final design.

The final design included a mistake (ref: second-from-right finger) that was overlooked when submitting the competition entry and ended up in final products.

Summary

The “Floral Hoodie WH AGH” is perceived as a success and is still obtainable through the Student Council of Faculty of Humanities.