Field Drop 01 is fourteen pieces: eight tees, three hoodies, two caps and one print on paper. Being the first drop, it also had to establish what the rule is. Some notes on how it came out.
What Field refers to
The warp field is the mark. Seven straight horizontal lines put through exactly one sine period, and nothing else. It is the smallest complete statement of what this shop does: straight things, bent once, still recognisable as straight things.
It runs through the site as a device, and it is also a product. Field is the mark printed on matte paper, unframed, at standard frame sizes so there is nothing to trim and no custom frame to pay for. It is the cheapest thing in the drop and the one that explains everything else in it.
Naming the drop after it was not a branding exercise. The mark came first, then the rule the mark demonstrates, then the fourteen designs that follow the rule.
Three decisions the drop settled
Half of it is on black
White reads clean on a screen and washes out on a body. Black gives the line work enough contrast to hold from across a room, which is the distance most of these designs are built for. The eight tees are split between the two, and the split is a decision rather than an accident of which artwork happened to exist.
The hoodie prints run the full front
The obvious approach is one print footprint for every garment. On a hoodie that is wrong. A hoodie has a full front panel, and a wave cropped to a chest square is a wave with its ends cut off.
Pulse is the design that settles the argument. It is horizontal lines squeezed together and pulled apart again in one long movement, and at chest print size the movement is simply gone. Run down the full front it works. All three hoodie designs are drawn for the panel they sit on rather than scaled down from a tee.
The caps are stitched, not printed
Embroidery cannot do what a printer can. Both cap designs are single continuous marks in one colour, one ring and one loop. They are the most restricted pieces in the drop and probably the most disciplined for it.
What did not move
The rule. Every one of the fourteen is a plain system put through exactly one distortion, with no second effect stacked on top. That held from the first sketch to the last file.
The palette held too. White, black, one grey and one lime, and the prints supply the colour. That was decided before the first design, and it turned out to be the easiest constraint of the lot, because the work is in the geometry and colour would only have got in the way.
What comes next
There will be a Drop 02: new systems, new distortions, the same rule. No date, because promising one would mean inventing a deadline nobody set.
Sooner than that, the sizes and the paper sizes may widen depending on what people actually order. In a shop that holds no stock, adding a design to a garment it is not currently on is the cheapest change there is.
The whole drop is in the shop, fourteen pieces, in the order they were drawn.
