Slope Day 2026 Merch Design

After being elected as one of the production managers for my dance team Big Red Raas, this was one of my first big tasks (aside from theme selection, but that is confidential until ~February). Slope Day was coming up and we had to come up with a variety of designs which the team would vote on. This is just a summary of what I worked on.

The artist performing was The Chainsmokers, which was really exciting. Since they are an EDM artist, I wanted to try and recreate that theme, so I thought of a neon light style. This led me to my first iteration of red crossed dandiya. I then iterated on it to have neon pink and cyan crossed over BRR text. All of this was done in Figma, as I was a bit familiar with its use and I wanted to improve my Figma skills since I found it fun. For the back design, I was pretty lost and came up with this generic design based on the 2K idea where instead of the K it would be the red crossed dandiya as an X or K. This led me to the final design with the pink/cyan on the front around the chest and the 2X26 text on the back.

Merch voting took place in a ranked choice voting format, and my design didn't do particularly well. You can see the winning design and real shirt on Instagram @cornellbigredraas.

Some people did like the neon kind of inspiration, but I think the back was just really generic and not that interesting. Additionally, some of the images seem a bit low quality in retrospect, which may have been an issue with my inexperience with Figma. I do still like the front design, but the back could have gone through a lot more thought/design iterations. Considering the winning design, it was more trendy and it was a more complex, well put together back design that ultimately just worked really well. I will definitely take this into consideration for future merch designs.