Ovative Whitewater Rafting
T-Shirts

Ovative offers and annual trip to go whitewater rafting in Northern Minnesota. Each year, there has been a new design created for the occasion. On account of there being more employees than ever before, the task of this year was to create different colored t-shirts with unique names to identify the groups and organize the

Drawing Board

Ovative was searching for an outdoors-themed design that could be modified for multiple groups to be identified on the company outing. Knowing swag gear had an affinity to be collected by employees and increase company moral, it was important to design something that would be cherished by employees and worn in the future.

Outdoor designs have a variety inspiration to draw from, but my team had a particular interest in creating a "patch" design. From this, we drew up a moodboard of styles and fonts that we could use.

Developing Ideas

To stay consistent with the whitewater rafting idea, we decided to pull names from typical rafting words that are used to call out wave-types, commands, and catchphrases. These would become the different groups of the outing.

Ride the Bull
Wave Train
Pool Drop
High Side
Wild Things

The octopus is an essential element to the brand's design with octopi decorating the office in the form of statues, posters, paintings and more. Continuing to inspire employee pride in the company's mascot, this icon needed to match the badge design and became a consistent element to the design, coming up from the depths of the water below the paddler's feet.

Final Product

Unfortunately the budget for the project was lowered like the water levels from Minnesota's drought, preventing us from going whitewater rafting and from having as many shirts. Thankfully, some quick thinking and some editing allowed us to create an updated design. Our rafting shirts became kayaking ones and we were ready to go outside.

This becomes...

...this!

The company's "slash logo" was replaced with paddles to add as a pocket detail and the shirts were ready for full scale