The Summit 2 is the second collaboration between Caribou Lodge and One Drop YoYos, featuring original artwork by Jason Week. There's a whole documentary coming about the process of designing the Summit 2 yoyo and how that whole week went down. It's gonna be great! But what we want to show you right now is the concept art that led up to the box stickers and engraving.
For this project we wanted to get the whole band back together so we called the amazing Jason Week and it was so fun getting to work with him again. His work on the first Summit was fantastic and we didn't want to do the new one without him.
I reached out and told him what was happening and very quickly got a conceptual direction from him. His concepting process alone is so cool and hypermaximalist.
We texted back and forth for a bit and things started to solidify.
From here we discussed the raw, natural look and feel of the original and of our whole brand vibe, and something more concrete took shape.
At this point Jason dug in and the final form started to get a bit clearer.
One of my favorite moments and details came here....the shadowy highlight of the two summits overlaps and forms either an S or a 2, depending on the orientation.
At this point in the process we needed something very quickly for the "First Draft" engraving, since our production deadline was so tight. I made the call on something from this concept page, and digitized it quickly for engraving. (Can you find it? Center left!)
When it comes to engraving, I'm personally a minimalist. I would have been very ok with keeping a simple engraving on the Side Effects but I knew that with Jason on board it would be such a waste not to get as much of his personality in the visual presentation as possible.
Jason sketched a couple of things on paper but line thicknesses turned out to be incredibly important here so he switched quickly to digital. From there we came up with the idea of a repeating pattern that isn't actually repeating....an amalgamation of mountains stacked to form tree-like totems, but each one unique. Somewhere between a repeating pattern and variations on a theme.
The final product is something that feels both organic and alien, like stumbling across cave paintings from a parallel world. And with all of Jason's work, the longer you stare at it the more you notice. The vibe of the engraving art is joyful and mysterious and if that doesn't describe this collaboration I don't know what else could.
Collaborating with other artistic minds means sometimes you get to let go of your own preferences and see where the wind blows, and I'm so happy that I kept my minimalism to myself on this one. The end result is amazing, and I hope you like it as much as we do.
The Summit 2 drops Thursday, May 14th at CaribouLodge.store and OneDropYoYos.com.
