In summer 2025, I crafted a new version of a vintage Dry Dredgers logo for embroidery on shirts, hats, and other merchandise. The organization currently uses an outstretched Flexicalymene trilobite as its emblem but its classic letterhead from the 1950s and 1960s featured a shield with a hand-drawn Isotelus trilobite and crossed hammer and shovel.
I had previously recreated a version of this older logo for the Dry Dredgers’ 75th anniversary bulletin in 2017. However, both the original and my recreation were unsuitable for embroidery, as they featured fine lines and stippling that would be difficult to achieve with physical thread.
I recreated the logo in Adobe Illustrator with thicker, simpler linework and moved the hammer and shovel behind the trilobite to improve the legibility of the design. As the Dry Dredgers don’t have true branding guidelines, the color scheme was left as an exercise for the artist. I came up with a handful of options, ranging from tropical blue, purple, and orange to stark gold and black.
Ultimately, we selected a rusty red color palette that fit the geology subject matter and looked good against the gray and khaki fabrics that the design would be embroidered onto.
As an experiment, I used Google’s Nano Banana image generator to transform the solid-color logo into a photorealistic embroidery, with good results.
Finally, I used Adobe Photoshop to extract and transform this simulated embroidery onto stock images of the polo shirts and hats.
