WHAT WE’RE CREATING:

This simple tutorial will show you how to quickly design a retro badge, and how to mock up your new design using the Go Media Arsenal templates.

Remember, there’s just a few days left to get 108 of Go Media Arsenal’s best apparel mockup templates for 92% off. This deal also includes a free 6 month MockupEverything.com subscription, including hundreds more mockup templates such as business cards, flyers, shopping bags, outside installation and many more! Click below to grab this deal for just $25 instead of the regular price of $307.

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Hello all! Simon here. I’m the Arsenal Manager for Go Media. I also happen to be one of the partners and designers at Studio Ace of Spade, a small yet mighty design shop head-quartered in Goshen, IN.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the process of designing a quick retro badge, that we’ll then use as an excuse to play with the Go Media mockup templates.

The process is quite simple, and is broken down in five phases:

  • Research
  • Sketches
  • Execution
  • Fine-tuning
  • Mockups

Here’s the final design we’ll be creating.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

STEP 1: RESEARCH

The research phase is crucial. One, it allows us to stay true to what vintage badges and ads were actually looking like. Old ads and packagings are an endless supply of shapes, colors, and textures. Since we are trying to emulate the vibe they were creating, we might as well get our inspiration from the source.

The way we’ll combine these inspiration sources is how we’ll create something unique.

Inspiration sources

With the magic of the interwebs, finding material won’t be a problem. The first logical step would be to google “vintage badges” and see what comes up. The problem with this is that Google is also going to give me the gazillions faux vintage badges that are currently sold on each and every stock vector sites. This could work in most cases, but here I wanted to make an effort to be period correct.

So instead, I’m going to head over to Allan Peters’ blog.

Allan Peters is a designer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After graduating from The College of Visual Arts, he worked for three small graphic design shops where he honed his design style. Next, Peters shifted his career and took a job at BBDO, the most-awarded ad agency in the world, where he learned the art of advertising. Peters is currently a senior art director at Target’s in-house studio. While at Target, he rebranded the company’s core brand imagery and designed the iconic Threshold logo, which was the cornerstone of the largest rebrand in Target’s history.

Badge Hunting

Other than his amazing work, his site hosts an inspiration bible, known as the “Badge Hunting” category. Every time he gets a chance, Allan haunts vintage and antique stores, and, as the name suggests, hunts down badges and other visual goodness.

He has at least five or six of these picture archives on his blog now, and they are simply fabulous. I went through the last four posts, and managed to spot a few cool shapes to draw from.

Allan Peter's badge hunting

“Allan

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Allan Peter's badge hunting

(Images © Allan Peters – All rights reserved)

After assembling your inspiration, you can build a quick mood board, and get to the next phase: sketching.

STEP 2: SKETCHING

A few rules of thumb to keep in mind while sketching:

  • Go quick
  • Try to be as synthetic as possible, don’t fret too much on details
  • The more, the merrier

The aim isn’t to copy one of the badges, but rather to let all of this goodness get mingled in your mind, and to come out rearranged through your pencil.

I did all of my sketches on printer paper, with a pencil and a black permanent marker in some cases. I probably spent 15 to 30 minutes looking up references, and 15 minutes sketching.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Because I was on a tight deadline, I voluntarily limited myself in the number of sketches. That’s why I also used printer paper rather than graph paper or my dot grid pad. I know that I would have spent too much time trying to trace clean shapes and to be “right-on-the-line.” Blank paper removes that psychological constraint.

Let’s play a quick game: can you spot the inspirations behind some of the sketches?

STEP 3: EXECUTION

I’m using Illustrator CC, but you should be able to create these designs in any version of Illustrator/vector program. You won’t have access to the new and fancy pen tool and live corner tool without Ai CC though. You will be able to recreate the effect of the newer tools through filters, but it’ll probably take a few more steps.

Badge foundations

I started with a new Ai document, of 15″x15″. It’s a big, square format that I like as a starting point.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

After turning the rulers and grid on, I renamed the base layer into “reference.” I then created a second layer on top, named “badge.” As you’ve probably guessed, I’m going to bring my sketch in there, and trace on top of it (File > Place).

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Lock the reference layer, and let’s start drawing! The base shape is definitely a square, rotated by 45°. In order to go faster, I’m going to turn on “Snap to grid” (View > Snap to grid). This will ensure that all my shapes stick to the lines and angles of the grid. You’ll notice that I’m not drawing exactly on top of my sketch. It’s here as a guide, not as something I need to perfectly trace.

I’m also drawing my shapes as transparent with a black stroke of one point. I like to stick to black and white at first. If the badge/logo works in black and white, it is very likely that it’ll look great in color as well. We haven’t solved the color palette yet, so black and white it is.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Type

Next, let’s create and place our text elements. The main hook is “Design Cuts and the Arsenal,” and the tagline is “Quality goods • Solid deals.”

We will add some other elements to the badge a bit later. If you look at the various inspiration elements, there are plenty of taglines such as “Ministry of Agriculture certified,” “Inspected by…,” etc. We might transform and use one of these to add a little bit of substance to our design. There’s also a bit of ornamentation we can play with, in order to “fill the voids” and keep the design balanced.

Allan Peter's badge hunting

In terms of typefaces, I didn’t go look too far. My main typeface is called Yesteryear. I found it through Google Fonts, and it’s a great brush font emulation. It reminds me a lot of some old art deco posters and ads. The secondary typeface is Mission Gothic, one of my current favorites from Lost Type Co-op.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

The trick to create the main hook is simple. Write out “Design Cuts” and “Arsenal” in Yesteryear, as two separate type elements, but with the same size. Write then “And” and “the” as two other separate type elements, in Mission Gothic bold this time. I used 48 points all around.

Proceed to stack them as shown below.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once you have them stacked, switch them to outlines (Right click > Create outlines). Remember that your copy won’t be editable anymore, so double check your spelling, just in case.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once the elements are switched to outlines, let’s make them both the same width, and center them together (I used 1″). I’ve left one grid square of vertical space between the two of them. The next piece of the puzzle are the top and bottom lines. In order to keep their width consistent, there are two methods:

The first method:

  • Just add two lines, and eye-ball their stroke thickness

The second method:

  • Grab the “T”
  • Make a copy of it
  • Delete the extra points that make it a “T” as opposed to just a line
  • Extend its width to make it the same width as the two words
  • Make a duplicate to get the second line, center them vertically, and tadaa!

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once there, it’s time to fit the “And the” more harmoniously in the line formed by “Design Cuts” and “Arsenal.” Use your judgement to make it look optically balanced. Turning off “Snap to grid” for the time being can help to precisely nudge elements into place. One of the visual references you can use is the size of the capital letters in Design Cuts and Arsenal.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once the line is complete, you can group it all together (CTRL/CMD + G) and/or give it its own layer, for a better organization of your document.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once that’s done, let’s place it on our badge background, and size it appropriately. My original sketch featured a line of type wide enough to be touching the sides of the diamond shape. As you can see below, this is creating some unpleasant visual tensions between the type and the edges of the diamond. I also have to take into account the future rounding of these corners.

My diamond is 4.5″ across, and my text 3.95″ wide at this point.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

With a line of text only 3.5″ wide, things are much more pleasant.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Time to place the secondary tagline in place. It reads “Quality goods • Solid deals,” and is written in Mission Gothic Black. I also switched it to all caps. Size-wise, it’s smaller that our main hook. I used the “g” of “Design Cuts” as my visual cue. You’ll notice that it’s centered in the badge, and slightly below the half line.

Quick tip: I got the “•” character by using the Twitter Keys bookmarklet.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

The main type stuff is done! Let’s finalize the badge itself, shall we?

STEP 4: BADGE FINE-TUNING

Cornering

We first need to round the corners of the diamond. As I mentioned before, I’m using Ai CC, which as of its latest update includes a very amazing “live corners” feature. It’s very similar to what the great Vector Scribe plugin from Astute Graphics does. Anyways.

After a little bit of trial and error, I chose a radius of 0.5″ for the left and right corners, and of 0.25″ for the top and bottom ones.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

If you don’t have Ai CC, all isn’t lost. I remember using this great little script by Hiroyuki Sato to take care of my corner rounding needs.

Colors

For the colors, the process is very simple. First, let’s turn the badge into a solid shape. Simply invert the stroke/fill from transparent and black to solid black and no stroke. Don’t forget to turn your type to white. Now’s also a good time to hide our reference layer.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

In order to find my color palette, I actually looked back at my reference images, and sampled colors I like from there. Since this is a two color badge, I tried to sample colors by groups of two or three (one dark, one medium, and one light).

I’ve used five of the reference images for the palette generation (#1, #2, #3, #4, and #5).

And here are my color palettes. Feel free to use these color combos as you wish. The fastest would be to just copy the image and paste it straight into your Ai document (the reference layer can be resurrected for this).

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Let’s apply these colors to our badge. I slightly reorganized my layers in order to keep the black and white version intact.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

In my book, number two, three, and six, are the solid ones. Let’s keep only these three on a new layer.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Further refinements

Switching the badge to color allows me to notice a few things:

  • The type elements are a tad too low for my liking
  • The “And the” type piece is a tad too high
  • The badge is a bit “empty.” I have two or three ideas to remediate this

Let’s start by addressing the type positioning. I’m starting by moving the “And the” down a bit. Then, I’m adjusting the two lines of type as a block, in relationship with their container. Watch the animated gif below closely to see the faint difference.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Next step, addressing the “empty badge” feeling. First, we’re going to add an inner outline of the diamond shape. We’ll be using “Offset path” to do so (Object > Path > Offset path). A value of 0.1″ looks perfect.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Next, switch the shape to be transparent with a stroke. You can either use the color of the type, or the secondary or tertiary color of the color palettes we’ve assembled earlier. You’ll also want to increase the thickness of the stroke a tad. Trying to match the the thickness of the lines above “And the” would make for good visual consistency. It brought my stroke value to 2 points.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

This has already more substance to it. Next, we’re going to add one of these little taglines I was mentioning earlier. Here’s our example:

Allan Peter's badge hunting

Let’s have the text of our little stamp read “Community inspected and Ministry of Design certified.” We’ll simply create a small circle (not much larger than 1″ in diameter) in the lower half of the badge, and use Mission Gothic Bold to write the sentence in it, in all caps.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Once you’re done writing, simply create a second circle on top of the first one, that’s transparent and has a stroke of the same color and thickness than our inner outline and type.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Fine tune the alignment and spacing with the bottom of the diamond, and tadaa:

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

I reduced the size of the stamp from 1″ wide and tall to 0.75″ wide and tall, and slightly adjusted the vertical alignment of the type within the circle.

The next thing would be to add an element in the top half of the badge. After a little bit of research and thinking, I decided for a crown. The Design Cut crew is from the U.K. after all. Following a similar process to the creation of the badge (reference, sketching, and tracing), here’s the crown I ended up with:

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Let’s add it to our badges. It’s coloured the same than the type elements. I also centered it horizontally, and gave it the same width than the “Community inspected…” stamp (0.75″).

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

I’m still not entirely convinced by the placement of the type elements. So I’m going to tinker with them a bit more, bringing them closer together, and slightly higher in the badge. I also moved the crown and the stamp up a bit. At this stage, it’s really about subtle differences.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

And here we have a final badge design, in three colours!

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

We could have played with many more elements: smaller crown, “burst” element in the background of the badge or around it, smaller ornaments inside the badge… We could play with textures and aging processes, too. This process is obviously indicative only, and you should absolutely make it your own.

STEP 5: MOCKING THE BADGE UP!

The mockup process is very simple and straightforward. Tom took the time to record a very detailed video walk-through of the templates and of their inner mechanics. I will however give you a quick summary of what’s happening.

First step, either download the freebie pack, or purchase the deal. Unzip the files, and tuck them away in your design resource library.

All of the Go Media templates work along the same general principle. It’s a combination of clever layer organization, blending modes, and post processing that makes everything possible. Let’s have a look, shall we? I’m using gma_tmp_mens-t-shirt_flat_back03.psd as the basis of my example here.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

The Shading layer group includes all the magic related to the shading and highlights of the template. You won’t have to worry about it 99.99% of the time.

The Art layer group is where we’ll past our badges shorty. It includes a layer to paste your art in (or above, or below), and most importantly, the Art clipping mask. This is the piece that ensures that your art stays within the boundaries of your garment.

The Shirt colours layer group is where you’ll be able to control the colour of the piece of apparel. We usually include a couple of presets, such (off) white, (off) black, and red. But you can change it to any shirt colour you’d like, and I’ll demonstrate this below.

Finally, you have a Shadows layer and Bkgd layer remaining. These two both pertain to the background’s appearance. Want to save a transparent png file? Just turn these two layers off. Want to change the background’s colour? Just fill the Bkgd layer with the color of your choosing.

Fair warning: in some templates (and it’s the case here), the Shadows layer includes the garment’s projected shadow. If you turn it off, it might look like the garment is flying in the void.

With that said, let’s mock things up. I’m first choosing to mock up my blue badge. Just head over to Ai, and copy the whole badge (CTRL/CMD+C).

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Then, paste it in our template, with the Art mask layer highlighted. This will make sure the badge gets pasted in the right spot in our layers. You could also just drag the layer at the right depth within your layers.

When prompted to do so, choose to paste the badge as a “Smart object.” This ensure that we’ll keep the original vector file “at hand,” just in case we want to easily revert the changes we’ll make to it.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Place the badge, and resize it as needed. Then apply the transformation(s). Also make sure that the smart object is clipped to the Art mask layer (CTRL/CMD+ALT/OPTION+G with the layer highlighted, or Layer > Make clipping mask). This ensures that it won’t go over the edge of the garment (think of an all-over print, for instance).

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Here’s my result. It’s nifty, although the red is not fitting my design at all.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

The first color option that comes to mind in terms of shirt color would be white. Just turn the red layer off, and tadaa, the shirt’s white.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Note that the shirt looks off-white. This is due to our goal to produce a photo-realistic mockup. With natural light, clothing would never look all white, but a very faint gray, hence the off-white. You can always make it lighter if needed, but we feel this is the most realistic rendition.

White is better, but what if I made the shirt the same color than the type elements? This would also cut down on production costs, as there would be only one color to print (to the condition that your supplier has a shirt of the right color in stock).

First, lets sample the colour from our Ai file. I get the following hexadecimal code: #f3edcd.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

We’re then going to create a new layer above the white mayer, and make sure it’s clipped to the Color mask layer. If you don’t, well, your color is going to bleed all over the file. Once the layer is created and clipped, just fill it with the gray-blue we sampled a second ago, and the shirt’s color will have changed! Easy as pie.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

And it works just the same with the other templates…

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Or other colours!

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

Note that I’ve been able to stack layers. But just turning them on or off, I can control what shows and what doesn’t. You don’t always have to create one file per mockup, but rather one file per concept.

One last thing: you can also mock shoulder prints. As long as they’re properly clipped, it’ll look just like it’s supposed to.

T-Shirt Mockup Template Badge Tutorial

I think that’s it for me at this point. If you have any questions about either the badge design process or (more importantly) the mockup templates, fire away! I’ll be watching the comments over the next few days, but you can also tweet at me, and I’m here to help.

I hope you enjoyed reading and going along the tutorial as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. And that the mockups will land you these art approvals you’re all after!

Remember, there’s just a few days left to get 108 of Go Media Arsenal’s best apparel mockup templates for 92% off. This deal also includes a free 6 month MockupEverything.com subscription, including hundreds more mockup templates such as business cards, flyers, shopping bags, outside installation and many more! Click below to grab this deal for just $25 instead of the regular price of $307.

Go Media’s Monster Mockup Collection (92% Off)