Kitzbühel – design notes

We love skiing and all things Alpine at T-lab, so creating ski-themed designs is a task we take to enthusiastically. The real challenge is to find new ways of expressing our enthusiasm so that the designs stay fresh.

Kitzbühel is a ski town with a reputation for fierce skiing and equally fearsome partying, so we thought that would be a great place to start. The design was going to be for a zipped sweatshirt – reproduced quite small to one side of the zip – so it needed to be small but punchy. Here’s a brief summary of how we got there…

We’re big fans of typography, by so a big ‘K’ was a natural starting point for us.

We also liked the delicacy of the ski-tracks in the shape of snowflakes, so we pursued that route for a while..

We eventually abandoned these in favour of something punchier, but there’s definitely a good design in there somewhere, so it’s probably one we’ll revisit in the future. So – back to the big K…

Whilst working with red and white stripes (the colours of the Austrian flag) we kind of inadvertently created a new shaped K that looked quite distinctive and punchy – these happy accidents can happen in the design process and the trick is to spot them and use them – so we started to work with our new K…

In our final design (below) the K is strong & distinctive, the snowflake is retro & fun, and the blue shading adds depth whilst also suggesting a couple of things like steep mountainsides and downhill ski tracks.

The final design hit our objectives of being ‘small but punchy’ and our Kitzbuhel sweat became our best selling sweatshirt for Christmas 2023 :)

You can see more of the sweatshirt in our online shop here.