Swinging at a machine, alone, behind a wall of netting

A tall rectangular structure fills the print, wrapped floor to roof in fine green netting drawn as a repeating mesh. Floodlights inside throw it bright against a black sky. Three figures stand in separate lanes mid-swing, balls hanging in the air, a small sign lit above each lane: 90, 110, 130.

Nothing about this scene is visible without the net in front of it.

Why is the whole structure drawn through mesh?

Because that's genuinely how it's seen from outside — through the netting that keeps the balls in, not directly.

Draw the same three figures without the mesh and it's a gym interior, generic and forgettable. Keep the netting between the viewer and everything happening inside, and the ordinary business of hitting a ball becomes a specific, recognisable structure with a texture nothing else on a street has.

Why floodlit against a black sky rather than daylight?

Because the tower only reads as a landmark once everything around it has gone dark.

By day it's one more building among many, netting or not. At night the floodlights inside make it the brightest thing on the block, glowing through the mesh rather than reflecting off a surface — which is closer to how a lit window works than how a building normally looks from outside.

What do the numbers above each lane mean?

The pitch speed the machine in that lane is set to throw.

Three lanes at three different speeds gives the figures inside a reason to be in different lanes rather than being interchangeable, and the numbers are the only text the design needs — no name, no score, nothing that assumes the reader knows the sport.

Can I use a real team's colours or numbers?

A specific team's exact colourway, wordmark or the numeral style tied to one of its players reads as that team's mark, the same way a team's own lettering is a protected house style rather than free-standing typography anyone can borrow.

None of that is needed here. The lane speeds are just numbers, the netting is unbranded, and the figures carry no team markings at all — the whole scene works without touching anyone's identity.

Does this work for someone who goes alone rather than with friends?

Either way, and the artwork doesn't change much between them. Three separate lanes already means three people not talking to each other, which is close to a corridor of rooms where everyone is being loud in private — being out at night doesn't require being with anyone, and going by yourself isn't the version that needs explaining.

Isn't hitting a machine alone a strange thing to put on a shirt?

Only if the machine is the point, and it isn't — the structure, the light and the net are.

Most of what people actually remember from a night like this isn't the swing count, it's the way the whole tower looked from across the street on the way home. The print is built from that image, not from a scoreboard.

Whether hitting balls at eleven at night is worth doing is a separate question the shirt doesn't answer either way.

How does a net of thin lines survive being printed?

By being drawn coarser than the reference, the same way the shutters two doors down handle a mural broken up by corrugation.

A true one-to-one mesh at print size fills in and reads as a grey smear rather than netting. Spacing the lines out and thickening them slightly keeps the texture legible while the floodlit interior and the black sky stay flat behind it. Forest green or black grounds hold the glow well; three inks.

How do I get one made?

Describe the cage at JustOG — how many lanes, what speed each one's set to, who's in which lane. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somebody's still in lane two at eleven.