Crayfish clothing contest conqueror!

You are looking at the winner of the International Association of Astacology T-shirt contest! By me!

• First place: “Astacus fluviatilis” by Zen Faulkes
• Second place: “Euastacus,” front and back design by Premek Hamr
• Third place: “Astacolic” by Alexa Ballinger (which you can see here)

I haven’t yet see the runner-up designs, which were shown at the last IAA meeting in Pitssburgh, but I look forward to seeing them! This started with the quote. I found it on page vi of Thomas Henry Huxley’s monograph on the crayfish (also Google Books edition). It took a little digging to find the author’s complete name and year of the quote. (Yes, my academic training is showing: obsession with complete and correct citations.)

While looking up the person who wrote the quote, I discovered that Rösel von Rosenhof was an amazing illustrator of the natural world. And he painted crayfish! So I was able to combine this wonderful quote about crayfish with this brilliant plate by the same person.

I cleaned up an image of one of Rösel von Rosenhof’s paintings, cleaning up page blemishes left over from the scan and making it a little brighter.

I kept some of the writing on the painting but repositioned it. The quote that started me off was not on the page, so I had to add it. I had just the thing: the Adorn font family evoked the style the old plate well. But the wonderful thing about a well made font family is that you can use a lot of different variations of text, and it still feels coherent.

Adorn has a lot of built in letter variants, and it was fun to play around with different swashes in CorelDraw! I am pleased people like this, but I’m sure that it won the contest is more a tribute to the artistry of Rösel von Rosenhof than my own graphic design skills. But this was not the only T-shirt design I submitted. Oh no. I was having fun with the shirt designs. This was actually the first concept I worked on:

The outline is a signal crayfish claw, if I remember right.The words inside the claw outline are the names of every genus of freshwater crayfish (according to Crandall and de Grave 2017). Originally, I played with the idea of using the name of every species of crayfish, but with over 600 and rising, there were too many and it was too likely to go out of date soon.

I like this design, but I was never able to get it to look exactly like it was in my head. I wanted the shape of the claw to be defined by the words alone. I like the big, bold shape of the claw and that it includes all the crayfish diversity within it, though.

I worried that the genus names might be too small and fussy for a T-shirt, but I liked that claw shape, so I made this variant:

It’s bold, though I worry that it’s a little simple.

To be honest, this was my favourite design:

I traced an image of a crayfish using in CorelDraw. I love Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, and modified the lines making up the trace to taper, giving it a sort of brush-like appearance. The font is Cherry Blossoms, which I wrapped around on an oval. This font, like Adorn, has a lot of options, and I had way too much fun trying out different swashes. (Discovering alternate glyphs and swashes has been a revelation.)

Initially, I only had “International Association of Astacology.” But the words traced out the oval so clearly on the top that the bottom looked broken and incomplete. I needed something to complete the shape, so I added in “the science of crayfish.” I loved this, because I feel like one of the big problems with being a member of the International Association of Astacology is explaining what “astacology” is!

I made variations of the three no-winning designs, too, changing the fonts and colours in different ways.The first version of the brushwork crayfish above had the colours flipped, with the crayfish in red, and the text above in black. But since ink was the inspiration, making the crayfish black made more sense.

Even though my favourite design didn’t win, I am completely thrilled to have won the T-shirt contest. I am mentioning this award this in my annual review folder!

And maybe a few more people will discover and appreciate the fine artwork of Rösel von Rosenhof.

References

Crandall KA, De Grave S. 2017. An updated classification of  the freshwater crayfishes (Decapoda: Astacidea) of  the world, with a complete species list. Journal of Crustacean Biology 37(5): 615-653. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/rux070

External links

August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof
How to swash: using a font’s alternate glyphs, text styles, and numbers
Critique: The Capricorn Experiment, plus: Font families