Sailor Jerry - Portugal Global Conference
I was commissioned by Sailor Jerry to design a ‘wallpaper’ as part of their new rebrand. The wallpaper was to be used for marketing assets and for ‘taking over’ at all activations, globally.
That said, I had to design something that was not only on brand and looked cool - but something that was incredibly versatile - and designed in in a way whereas it could scaled up or down, tweaked or adjusted by anyone ..for anywhere and without compromising the overall artwork or appearance.
Not only was this an incredible opportunity for myself and my career, it was the ‘first time’ that I would be meeting and working with the global team - and it was also my first time to Lisbon, Portugal!
As it was the first time Sailor Jerry had done anything like this before, we decided in addition to design exclusive Steen Jones x Sailor Jerry merch for the team and VIP guests!
For those reading and that aren’t familiar with ”Sailor Jerry” or simply haven’t followed me for long enough to know how much of an influence and inspiration this man has been to my career - to me, it really couldn’t have been a bigger opportunity or honour to be handpicked for something of this magnitude. What a trip (pun intended).
Big thank you to Chin Roo and the Sailor Jerry team x
Design Process
I started with the typical ‘how the fuck am I going to do this’ moment and questioning my entire career choice before actually getting started. Once I had that out of the way, I got pen to paper - played around with a few concepts until I worked out the best way to approach this ..which was right in front of me the whole time ..standard.
The best way to approach this was to simply design a bunch of ‘tattoo flash’ sheets and design them in a way whereas I could join them all together to create a continuous and interchangeable tile - easy? It would have been if I wasn’t determined to design this with a classic look and feel of the“original artwork” - which meant I physically painted the artworks in watercolour before scanning them in, tweaking and finalising in digital.
The Wallpaper
By arranging the artworks in the way that I did, I could connect all of the individual sheets together - without any showing any visible or obvious seams. This allowed us to achieve the continuous look and with the endless combinations of 10x different and interchangeable sheets we had limitless layout options - in 7 different colour-ways.
Wallpaper + Promotional Usage
Do to the popularity and versatility of the collaboration, Sailor Jerry also decided to license the artwork for the below point of sale and marketing collateral.
Sailor Jerry Conference
With the wallpaper designed, sent over and ready to rock n’ roll - it was time to head Lisbon to meet the team, get paintin’ and officially launch it!
Here’s a few shots from the live paint on opening day.
Sailor Jerry Conference - Closing Party
All good things must come to an end - and as always with Sailor Jerry, they did so in style, with renting the most incredible “beach house” in Ericeira for the closing party.
The “house” was perched atop hill, with a huge deck overlooking the beautiful and world-famous surf coast. There was an abundance of rum, great crew, great tunes & tattoo’s goin’ down. This event would start the tradition of me getting the location of the event tattooed on me. It was the best way to wrap up the collaboration and amazing week!
