Monday, June 10, 2013

Evolution of the Team Kennedy 2013 Patch

In the spring, we held our mission patch contest with students to help determine the patch that would represent our MicroGravity eXperience flight. The top two patches from each of the five schools were chosen, and the ten finalist patches were part of the voting round. The final patch won by a considerable margin.

I thought you'd like to see the progression of taking a hand drawn patch to the digital creation and final sew out.

We started with the hand drawn patch:

Using Adobe Illustrator, the patch was converted to a vector drawing. 

Then, using Inkscape, I cleaned up and extracted the image of the jet.
Next, I found a photo of a globe, converted it to a vector, and added images of our four home states and Texas where the flight will occur.
      
Since the globe was then cropped against a black circle so it would match with the original patch design. I also decided to color code the five states.


Next was creating the images to build the layers of the patch. A black inner circle with a larger outer circle.
     
Finally, I used Adobe Photoshop to combine the individual layers. Text was then added, and we also played around with colors.
     


We decided we liked the yellow background for our names best, and our emblem was complete ready to become an embroidered patch! When we shared the patch with our patch company, we made a few more changes to make the stitching work. The letters on the black of space with the white outline became all white. The patch company also made a few changes to size of some of the text. Finally, we got a sew out sample!


And that's the story of how a patch is created from a drawing, digitized, and then sewn. I hope you enjoyed seeing the steps that are involved.
  
 Our embroidered patches should be arriving soon. You can contact your MicroGravity eXperience participating teacher for details on purchasing one or contact us through the comments to find out how to get one of these for yourself. I know we can't wait to sew this awesome patch onto our flight suits!



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