By Mariella Bishop
Homecoming is a big deal for most schools, especially for The Lovett School. The football games, the dance, the pep rally—it’s the one time of year when spirit wear normally sells out faster than the fried ravioli at lunch. So when the time came for someone to design the homecoming t-shirt for 2025, the pressure was on. After all, this is the shirt everyone will be wearing at football games, around school for NUDs, and probably again when they’re too tired to do laundry after a long day of school.
The designer behind this year’s homecoming shirt is freshman Isabella Ying. She walked up to the free-throw line as if it were no big deal and sank the shot on her first try, not just for her T-shirt design but for basketball, too. While most freshmen are still trying to remember their schedule or where every class is, Isabella has already created a name for herself and gotten the whole school wearing her work.
Designing a homecoming shirt isn’t easy, especially for a freshman. One wrong image choice and suddenly no one will want to wear it. However, Isabella crushed the challenge with her Country Roads design. She transformed the theme into a shirt that gives off “school pride” while also keeping the song stuck in your head.
“I wanted to design the homecoming shirts because it seemed like a fun thing,” Isabella said. This may be her first official design project, but it doesn’t seem like it with her natural talent. She’s helped her dad with advertising projects before, though she admitted it wasn’t that often and never clothing. While doing things digitally made things a little easier, it was still a challenge. “I’m not good at drawing,” she said, “so doing graphic design is a way of being able to do art without being artistic.”
What makes this even more impressive is that Isabella created the entire design herself. The only instruction she was given was the theme, Country Roads. From there, she ran with it, turning her own vision into something everyone at Lovett will be wearing. Her friends had encouraged her, telling her she’d make a good design, and clearly they were right.
She told me that she went through many rough drafts, and I even saw her working on the design in between classes.
And because one talent apparently isn’t enough, Isabella is also a standout basketball player, and right now she’s playing flag football.
I asked her if she wanted to continue designing things such as clothing in the future, and she said probably not. So, in case digital design doesn’t work out, she always has her natural basketball skills.
For now, she’ll be able to see work on t-shirts around campus. “I think it’s cool to have my design on shirts,” she said. “I would say I’m happy I got chosen.”
