project image · with sign-stripe
Commission · 2025
Antebellum festival gown
Texas Rose Festival · Tyler, TX
A third dialect for the same project, weighted toward sign-painter workshop vocabulary — slab-serif display, utilitarian condensed labels, warm aged-paper palette, sign-painter red and mustard accents. Less graphic-novel; less heritage-pattern-book; more trade-craft punch.
Warm cream paper as the working surface; sign-painter red and mustard ochre as the active pair; dark leather brown for ink; the rest in workshop neutrals.
A slab-serif display for the punch, a condensed display for the work-labels, a utility sans for the running body, and a typewriter for shop-receipt detail.
DM Sans is a contemporary geometric sans-serif with utilitarian rigor and a slight warmth — the typographic equivalent of a clean shop apron. We'd set the body at 16px / 1.6 line-height. Italic for emphasis, bold weight for product names or technical terms. Where the Simplicity register reads like a heritage pattern catalog, the body here reads like a contemporary working shop newsletter: confident, clear, no nonsense.
Each project as a sign-painter card: image with stripe band, condensed-display label, slab-serif title, sans-serif meta line, typewriter detail. Sign-painter palette stripe replaces hairline rule.
A sample composition showing the register applied to a typical page section — subtitle, body paragraphs, sign-painted pull-quote, transition language.
We build clothes for the people who need their garments to do something nobody off-the-rack would ask of them. A bride who's been thinking about the dress for three years. A theater company building costumes that will appear under stage lights and on archive video. A festival court whose gowns will be passed down to next year's wearer. A Wicked-night premiere where every costume needs to read at twenty feet.
We build cool shit.
It's the work of fitting a body, not a size. The work of finishing seams the way they're meant to finish, because that's what holds. The work of asking the right questions before the first cut — about who's wearing this, what they need it to do, where it's going to live, how it'll be cleaned. We talk to clients the way a good shop talks: direct, curious, no upsell.