Chris McNally is an illustrator, designer and printmaker from Colorado, currently living and working in San Francisco. We first met Chris a few years back, on a bikepacking journey across the islands of the southern Hebrides, as we made our way to Grinduro Scotland. You can read about this memorable trip on the Pannier.cc journal here…
While in Scotland, Chris created some beautiful illustrations of the trip (see below) and we always new we wanted to work with him at some point in the future…
At the beginning of this year we felt it was time to reach out to Chris and start talking about some sort of creative collaboration – something which focused on our tagline ‘Built Through Experience’ and which could work on a new line of accessories. ‘Built Through Experience’ is a phrase which has accompanied the brand for almost 10 years and sums up our emotional connection to not only riding bikes, but also designing and building them.
We are built by the positive experiences we have whilst riding our bikes. These experiences feed into our own interests in cycling and ultimately go on to influence the products we design, build and eventually sell to our customers.
After a series of phone calls – us finishing up a day at Brother HQ in the Kent Downs and Chris just in from a morning surf in the Pacific – we settled upon imagery from our Brother in the Wild Dorset event as inspiration for Chris’s illustration. Anyone who has joined us in Dorset will recognise the landscape – big skies, rolling hills and the Atlantic Ocean stretching into the distance.
For us, this event really sums up ‘Built Through Experience’ – not only is it providing guests with positive experiences on their bikes, but it also signifies just how far our products have come; developing over the years as our own interests in cycling change and develop.
Chris’ work mixes the textures and tactile qualities of analog, hand rendered mediums with that of digital, providing a unique look which we absolutely love – the resulting image is stunning:
We will be offering this as a high-quality art print, printed on 300gsm luxury Gesso paper that will look great framed or just as it is. Chris has also created a simplified vignette design which we’ve applied to water bottles and t-shirts – all available to buy online >> here <<
