Project Mess Hall Case Study-Laavanya Gandham

Two designs for embroidered patches; one for the spirit of Athens & the other with full creative freedom

Project Date: Spring 2026 Tools Used: Adobe Photoshop Project Overview This project included designing two originally embroidered patches for Mess Hall, reflecting their brand and interactive hat-bar experiences. Both designs were made in Adobe Photoshop and were optimized for embroidery constraints, such as limited options for thread colors, complicated typography, and complex shapes. The final deliverables are high-resolution PNG & Adobe files sized at 3x3 inches.

The Problem Mess Hall is a local Athens, Georgia business with a distinct identity, as customers can personalize their hats with unique iron-on patches; a key part of the brand experience. The challenge was to design patches that (1) aligned with the Athens spirit and (2) unique but still went along with Mess Hall’s brand and ideation, and work within the technical constraints of making it transferable to a patch.

Embroidered patches come with a good number of limitations: shapes must be clean and simplified, text must be large enough to be stitched legibly, colors must be chosen from a limited thread palette, and small details that work digitally may not be transferable.

The Solution Patch A: “How About Them Dawgs” The concept for Patch A comes from one of Athens’ most popular phrases; it’s tied to UGA football culture that any local or just fan would immediately recognize. The goal was to design a patch that felt like an authentic Athens saying rather than a generic sports reference.

The design process began with inspiration from a triangle-shaped patch layout on Pinterest. I attempted to recreate a similar layout on Photoshop but ended up not following through with it when I was having difficulty adding more text to it as I didn’t realize I had selected the wrong image size to begin with, and it ended up taking too much storage; so I had to delete it and start from scratch.

When starting over, I explored Photoshop’s Warp and Distort tools to curve the lettering into a near-circular arc, giving the text a more dynamic, badge-like feel instead of a more rigid shape.

I originally had wanted to place the text over a football, but it kept skewing with the shape of the letters, and it was not cohesive. I explored some other variations: erasing everything except the stitching texture, experimenting with a black background, and testing different colored text options.

Ultimately, I opted for a clean light background with a circular border; both for its visual simplicity and because it most closely mirrors how the design would translate to an actual stitched patch.

Patch B: “Tying the Knot” While I was making Patch A, I was playing around with different shapes and found a whole set of different custom shapes embedded into Photoshop, like trees, flowers, and boats. Since I had just seen a The Summer I Turned Pretty TikTok, boats and marriage were fresh on my mind, and I started looking up boat puns. I settled on a cliche but classic one, “Tying the Knot”. A book I read once talked about how people buy their partners anchors to symbolize “you’re my anchor to shore” kind of things, so I wanted to incorporate an anchor too. I first looked at different anchor pictures to figure out what I was looking for.

The primary technical challenge was incorporating a white anchor into the design. When uploading a white anchor image and removing the background in Photoshop, the white elements were eliminated along with the background, making the anchor invisible. Finding the right boat silhouette for the background was also challenging. The pre-built shapes in Photoshop included intricate boat illustrations with too many small details that would be difficult to actually embroider.

The final adjustments focused on ensuring the three main elements (font, anchor, and boat) felt cohesive and balanced within the patch’s unique format.

Results

Above are the final patches. I found that the technical difficulties within Photoshop actually pushed me to discover new ideas and tools within the program. The most significant lesson from this project was that the embroidery constraints actively shaped better design decisions.

Future iterations could explore a version of Patch A with a football element that is cohesive with the text, perhaps as a small icon rather than a background shape. The phrase should have also been “How Bout Them Dawgs” instead of “How About Them Dawgs” to more accurately reflect the Athens’ catchphrase. For Patch B, testing alternate color combinations for the anchor and boat could add more visual depth while staying within a limited thread palette.