With King's next Dyno Day less than a month away, I thought it might be fun to take a look back at the event shirt designs. Each year of the event, King has designed and printed event T-shirts for each attendee.

In recent years, we began smaller runs of specially-designed shirts for the Event Staff. Separate shirts would make it easier for attendees to find King staff on the day of the event.

Here's a look!

Dyno Day 2009:

This shirt was designed by my predecessor, Jude Z., who was also King's in-house designer for many years. This shirt was black and featured the RSX Challenge car tightly strapped down on King's dyno. I've never seen one of these shirts in person but would love to!

Dyno Day 2010:

2010's Dyno Day was the first event I worked on with King. The first thing I tackled was a logo for the event. I drew inspiration from King's dyno bay, which has a bright yellow safety zone painted around it.

That yellow shape safety zone became the foundation for the Dyno Day logo. I separated out the "2010" so it would be easy to swap out from year to year. The back of the shirt included a Mugen-equipped S2000 in clean vector art.

Some trivia... one of the early versions of this shirt had the dyno positioned incorrectly under the front wheels. D'oh! So glad we caught that before going to print!

We also designed a Staff version of the shirt for the year, which was to be printed on a red shirt. Unfortunately our shirt printer didn't have them printed in time for the event, so sadly this design never saw the light of day.

Dyno Day 2011:

For the next year, we decided to do a brighter shirt. The front includes the King #64 Grand Am car and some of the chassis codes you'll find in the King facility on any given day. Unlike the previous year, we chose not to feature a single car. From a design perspective, a challenge for auto event shirts is what vehicle (if any) to put on the shirt. You can put a car on the shirt, but it should have significant meaning to the enthusiasts or to the event. Or you can put an ensemble of cars on the shirt, but that quickly makes for a cluttered shirt. Or you can stylize the car, so it isn't so immediately recognizable as a certain model. Or you can leave cars off the shirt altogether.

Close up. Can you spot your own chassis code?

This year we were able to get the Staff version of the shirt printed up. The logo was re-used, but this time in red.

Dyno Day 2012:

This was a very special Dyno Day. As in previous years, Mugen representatives flew out from Tokyo to show off new products and meet enthusiasts. But in 2012, Mugen shipped the Mugen CR-Z: RR concept car from Japan to King's shop in Wisconsin -- this was one of the handful of times that a Mugen concept car had ever made this 6200 mile journey. This orange beauty had to be our color theme this year. I drew a vector version of the CR-Z: RR for the front, and we added the Mugen logo for the first time on a Dyno Day shirt.

Here's the Staff version of the shirt:

Dyno Day 2013:

This year's theme is "Honda Nostalgia," which we've defined loosely as pre-EG6 era vehicles. King designed and built some of the very first Honda race cars in the USA, and we wanted to celebrate the engineering and simplicity of those early Honda models. The front of the shirt includes one of my favorite photos of the King-built GT5 Civic race car. I felt this year needed a new version of the Dyno Day logo to better fit with the nostalgia (1970's) theme. These vintage photographs are so awesome I was tempted to slap the photo alone on the shirt -- no logos or anything else -- and call it a day. :)

The back of the shirt includes an awesome photo of the GT4 Civic. I always wanted to work MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN into the shirt and was able to this year.

I split out the car into a triptych to make the overall design vertical, and to give the sense of speed to the GT5 Civic -- as though it was moving so fast it could barely be photographed.

Here's a preview of the Staff version of the shirt for this year.

If you've missed out on any of these shirts, the event Attendee shirt is usually available for sale on the King website after the event. The best way to get one is to sign up and join us for the event! Hope to see you there!