The brief
A cycling apparel brand for riders in the windy hills of Solano County, California. It had to belong to one place, read as a real kit brand on the road, and come with files a sublimation printer could work from. A mood board alone would not do.
This is concept work. UPWIND is a made-up brand with no client and no sales, built so the whole system could be shown finished.
What we made
- A leaning wordmark (every display line leans 10 degrees) and a windsock emblem, with lockups as SVG, PNG and print PDF
- A six-colour palette named for the place: Straw, Oak, Turbine, Delta, Poppy and Tule, delivered as swatches, JSON, CSS and plain text
- A pattern system drawn from the real contours of the Vaca Mountains at four wind speeds: calm, 10, 20 and 30 knots
- Beaufort Series 001: Force 3, Force 5 and Force 7 jerseys, front and back
- Sublimation panel sheets for all three jerseys at 1780 x 1260 mm on a size M base
- Kit extras: a cap, socks and a bottle, plus hang tags
- Measured profiles of two local climbs, Mix Canyon Road and Gates Canyon Road
- Ten AI concept photographs (rider, product, flat lay, fabric and landscapes), generated with the real jersey and kit artwork as references
How it works
One rule runs the system: same hills, any wind. The contour lines come from public height data for the Vaca Mountains, then get stretched sideways by wind speed, with the stretch set at knots divided by two. Calm is the map as it is. Force 7 at 30 knots pulls the same hills into the long streaks on the orange jersey. Each jersey is named for its wind, so the pattern tells you what kind of day it was made for.
The kit carries the road too. The Force 7 back panel prints the name and coordinates of Mix Canyon Road, and the pattern board plots its measured profile: 7.5 km, 685 m of climbing, a 9.1% average and 20.7% for the steepest 100 m. Profiles are sampled every 10 m and smoothed over 50 m.
The production files are set up for a printer. One unit is one millimetre, the art runs 15 mm past every cut line, and all type is outlined, so nobody has to install a font. All 28 SVG files parse and all 28 PNG files open.
What we threw away
Two review passes changed the set, with every board rendered and checked before it was kept. The Force 5 index lines were dark Oak, and on the gold jersey they read as wood grain, so they went white. Multi-line headlines leaned as one block and made a staircase edge, so now each line leans on its own. The gold Force 5 jersey vanished on the cover lineup, so the lineup moved onto a neutral band. The cap got redrawn with a flipped brim and a pinstripe centre panel.
From the photographs we left out the three-rider echelon shot. The wordmarks on the jerseys came out as letter-shaped scribbles, and a brand page cannot show its own name misspelled.
Limits
- Concept work. UPWIND is made up: no client, no sales and nobody riding in it.
- The photographs are AI concept imagery, not a shoot. A real launch needs the real kit on real riders.
- The panel sheets sit on a generic size M base, not a factory's graded pattern. They get rebuilt on the maker's templates before anything is printed.
- CMYK values are maths conversions, not press-matched. Colour gets approved on a strike-off.
- The Force 5 and Force 7 panel PDFs and both lockup PDFs are pure vector. The Force 3 panel PDF carries three 300 ppi image layers, so it needs a vector rebuild before it goes to print.
- The cap is a flat side view, the simplest drawing in the set.
- Climb grades are measured from public data and rounded, so treat them as close, not surveyed.
