Portfolio → 8 Mile Boulevard Association Streetscape T-shirts

The Challenge

8MBA hosts an annual luncheon that brings together mayors, city staff, business owners, and community stakeholders from across the corridor. Like most nonprofit events, they’d done the t-shirt thing before. And like most event shirts, those tees ended up in a drawer or a weekend car-wash rotation. They needed something different – a shirt that actually represented the identity of 8 Mile and gave people a reason to put it on again.

The Solution

The original plan was a streetscape illustration – a skyline of sorts – that captured the corridor. We could’ve gone the stock-art route and called it a day, but 8 Mile isn’t a place that deserves generic treatment. It’s one of the most recognized roads in the country, and the communities along it have a deep, gritty, proud identity that clip art would never capture.

So we pulled up Google Maps and started scouting. We spent a full day identifying iconic buildings along the corridor, then narrowed the list through multiple rounds until we had a lineup that anyone familiar with the area would immediately recognize. From there, we hand-rendered each building using Illustrator and a drawing tablet – deliberately imperfect line art that feels sketched, not generated. That “perfectly imperfect” quality was the whole point. It mirrors the character of 8 Mile itself.

The final design was screen printed in white ink on Gildan Softstyle CVC tees in Cactus and Pitch Black Mist – 300 shirts for the luncheon, paired with the association’s existing branding and tagline. We managed the full print production run.

The feedback was immediate. Stephen Lindley, 8MBA’s executive director, started spotting the shirts out in public – not at association events, but at unrelated meetings across the region. People recognized the buildings. They asked questions. That’s exactly what a community organization needs its swag to do – not sit in a closet, but spark a conversation about the work.