Portfolio Case Study | RFL Design Corp

Client: Slowbucks

Project: Logo design & brand mark

Year: 2009

Role: Creative Director

Category: Designer, logo, brand mark, early hand-to-hand sales

The Story

In 2009, I lived across the street from Bucks. He and his partner had a clothing brand with a logo they couldn't stand; a clock with a dollar sign. Every designer they'd worked with heard "Slowbucks" and drew exactly what it sounds like.

I sat down with him and listened first. Asked where the brand came from, where it was going, and who it was for. The audience part was easy. I grew up in hip-hop culture, no research required.

The mark I designed was a character. The snail came from the name. The scattered bills came from a trip to 7-Eleven between sessions where someone was running lotto at the counter and I stood there long enough to notice the display behind the register. That image came back when I needed a solution.

The result was a logo with personality — something that could live on a shirt, a fitted, a sticker, a chain, and be recognized across all of them.

What Happened

Slowbucks exploded. Snoop Dogg wore it, Rick Ross wore it, Chris Brown wore it. The brand signed a distribution deal with Marc Ecko in 2014. Getty Images has over 180 photos of the brand and its founders. The logo showed up on stages, in music videos, across hip-hop media.

I wasn't just the designer, I was in the trenches early on doing hand-to-hand sales, moving product, building the brand from the street level. In 2012, I met the second partner at a print shop, which led to a phone conversation with Nipsey Hussle. That one project had opened doors I didn't know existed.

The brand went through its own chapter after that but the logo never lost its footing. It's still recognized, referenced, searched for. Years later, a new client found me specifically because he'd spent years trying to track down whoever designed the Slowbucks mark.

Design Decisions

The first decision was how literal to go. I decided early that the mark had to be a symbol, something that would occupy space on a shirt, read from a distance, and hold up across colorways. In 2009 streetwear was running a lot of color variants based on upcoming sneaker releases, and I knew a brand with real legs had to move with that, to fit into what different people wanted to build around it.

Three animals came through before the snail landed. A piggy bank. A turtle. Then the snail. The turtle was actually selected at one point. What shifted it was the structural problem I was trying to solve: I wanted the letters to live inside the animal itself, to have the name embedded in the figure. The snail shell gave me the geometry for that. The shell became a dollar sign. The snail covered "slow." The dollars trailing behind it covered "bucks."

Those dollars are lifted directly from a 7-Eleven visit. I went in during a break between design sessions and got stuck behind someone running lotto at the counter. I kept staring at the scratch-off display behind the register to pass the time. The arrangement of the bills on that sign stayed with me. When I needed a solution for what was floating behind the snail, that image came back. I didn't know it would be useful until it was.

A design student looking at this in 2026 might question it — the curves are from where I was technically in 2009. But the reason it worked then and still gets referenced now is that it didn't follow the pattern. In 2009 most brands put words on a shirt and called it a logo. Slow Bucks had a character with built-in personality that the wearer could make their own. It was recognizable, it scaled, and it spoke to the brand name without spelling the story out. That's what a logo is supposed to do.

The Lesson

Every designer they talked to before me went literal. One conversation changed the direction. I asked the right questions, paid attention to who they actually were, and built something from observation. That's the RFL method years before I had a name for it. Listen First. Design Second.