Geese Attacks: A Wardrobe for a 50th Birthday

My brother has, over the years, been attacked by a startling number of animals. The one that has stuck in
our family’s collective imagination is a goose. I have spent a non-trivial portion of my adult life
giving him goose-themed gifts.

For his 50th birthday I went overboard. I made him a wardrobe.

Close-up of the Geese Attacks pattern: criminal geese smoking and holding knives, with a skull, on a pink-lavender JS monogram background

The logo

First I needed a mark. The brief I wrote to myself was something like: heavy metal band, but the band is
his initials. JS, Josh Sutherland, locked together as a single angular symbol that
would tile nicely as a background.

The pattern

Then the geese. Not just geese: criminal geese. Smoking. Holding knives. Standing over a skull.
Drawn loose and inky, then arranged in a repeating tile against the JS monogram so the whole surface reads
as one piece of fabric design.

Wider view of the repeating pattern showing the variety of criminal-goose poses interlocked with the JS monogram tile

The wardrobe

From there I had everything I needed to print on demand. Jacket, t-shirt, bucket hat, slides, mugs.

Bomber jacket printed all-over with the Geese Attacks pattern in blue and white

T-shirt with the same all-over pattern, blue geese on white

Bucket hat split between the pink JS monogram pattern on the crown and blue geese on the brim

Slip-on slides with the JS monogram in blue across the strap

Mug with a horizontal cast of criminal geese standing around a skull. Caption reads: 'Celebrating 50 years of Geese Attacks!'

Two mugs stacked, showing different sides of the design

The result

He laughed. He wore the jacket. The joke compounds. He’s 50 now, and as long as another goose
doesn’t finish the job, there’s a 60th coming in ten years and I’m already thinking about
the next escalation.