Guard Comp Designs Personal Project | 2022-2023
The park district that I worked for as a lifeguard and pool manager has a great unique culture at each of their 5 neighborhood pools. The philosophy of having 5 pools rather than one central location was to increase accessibility and ties to individual neighborhoods. This culture carried over to the staff at each pool, with an annual community event called “Guard Comp” being hosted in the middle of every summer for the past 30+ years. This event allowed each pool to send a team of staff members to compete in specific events loosely based on lifeguard skills. This was also open to the public and was a way to show regular patrons lifeguards in action.
Because I worked at the oldest pool in the park district, we had the longest standing tradition of excellence and took guard comp pretty seriously (We had two 3-peats in my time working there). Part of the event every year was choosing a theme and decorating each pool accordingly. The pool I worked at was called “Recreation Pool” or “Rec” for short (They were very creative with place names back in the 1930s), and so we found a way to make our themes puns with “REC” in them each year. In addition to these themes, we created guard comp tank tops and stickers with a theme specific design. In my last two years at the pool, I took the lead on creating these designs.
First up is 2022’s theme “Top Guard: MavREC”, which was inspired by the recent movie “Top Gun: Maverick”. This was one of the first logos I ever created and therefore played it pretty safe. I adapted the Top Gun logo to include our theme name and then included an outline of the pool at the bottom. Nothing more to say here. This was actually the one year that we lost the competition, and therefore didn’t end up creating tank-tops, so the design only lives on as a sticker.
For 2023, we choose “RECvenge of the Sith” as our theme. This was for a myriad of reasons, but a large one was our goal to make a comeback from our loss in the previous year. I had many different ideas for the logo, but I ended up creating a parody of a Revenge of the Sith poster that I found. I took the element of shadows of people battling in the foreground and replaced the background with a sketch of the main building at our pool in the same color scheme as the poster. This design was maintained for the sticker but had to be changed for the tank top due to copyright reasons. Therefore, I replaced the two people battling with lightsabers to two lifeguards battling with guard tubes. I also made some modifications to the text and added “Guard Comp Champs” at the bottom. The stickers turned out great, but I’m not too happy with how the tank tops turned out. The coloring that was printed varied a bit from what was sent in, but the colors also just didn’t translate well to clothing.
