Ever wonder about the creative soul that delivered unto us our sweet Century Climbing Challenge 2014 t-shirt design?

Her name is Heather Jacobs. She’s a designer for Kohl’s, as well as a freelance designer. Our own Brittany Parker, who also works at Kohl’s corporate headquarters, is friends with Heather. They collaborated on the idea, and Heather went to work.

I thought there would be several versions we’d have to keep improving upon. After all, Heather’s never even been climbing!

Instead, Heather said, “What if we did a cool climbing object overlaid on top of a lighter-colored background with something significant to the challenge?”

Brittany said, “Oh, like a map of Devil’s lake behind a cam!”

“What’s a cam?”

“It’s the bad-ass way of climbing.”

I’m paraphrasing, because I wasn’t there. They emailed me a concept file the next day and it looked amazing! We sent it to the email distribution list for people who had signed up early in the year, and everyone loved it. I showed it to Craig at Adventure Rock (huge secret: he has a visual arts background and comes up with the killer concepts used by AR for their promotions and competitions). Craig loved it. He loved it so much that he joined the challenge this year just for the shirt!

An idea that’s been passed around a bit is getting the design printed on hoodies for this fall and winter’s climbs. We would hold a pre-order with delivery about five weeks later. What do you think? Would you be interested in having this year’s design on a hoodie?

Leave a comment below (we get a lot of spam comments, so yours won’t appear right away–it’s on a delay). Or log in to Facebook and leave your comments there!

Thanks, and as always: tell your climbing friends about the Century Climbing Challenge. We have 83 participants so far this year, and I know we’ll break 100!