Tatiana Manaois Merchandise

For this project, the client initially commissioned a single design based on one of her upcoming songs. With a varied audience and no real focussed target demographic, it was suggested that this item should interpret the songs messages and themes in whatever style best represented it. While this was the case in following ideation, Tatiana’s position as a young artist and a rising name in the music world undeniable influenced the direct of these designs, considering the landscape and conventions of contemporary pop music’s visuals.

The initial concepts, focussed on unreleased song ‘A Fire You Started’, considered the album cover art and imagery, trying to create a consistent thread between the existing visual material and new merchandise. This consistency would also benefit her brand from a marketing perspective, an obvious consideration for a growing musician. These were predominantly lettering-based concepts, with hand-drawn text conveying a sense of intimacy and personality for audiences to connect with.

From these sketches, two clear ideas were trialled – A letter-centred concepts and a more contemporary and modern approach. With both ideas being reasonably successful, the first prototypes of each were shown to the client. At this stage, the project shifted into a full merchandise run, with Tatiana requesting both concepts to be produced and additional concepts for two other upcoming songs.

For some of these concepts, the client came with an existing idea of the basic design and structure. This removed the entire ideation process, requiring me to simply remake and adjust the provided example to be more suitable and in-line with the existing examples. With these items now releasing as a single collection, there was a need for typographic consistency across designs where possible.

For other concepts, there was more creative freedom. The client had provided an image to be utilised, which formed the basis of the following ideation. At the more extreme ends, this included creating an WPAP version of the image inspired by pop art practitioners such as Wedha Abdul. This concept was not used, with the client wanting more minimal and clean designs to complete the collection.

By the end of this process, 9 t-shirts were produced and sold, featuring 5 different designs. This project was undoubtably challenging, with time differences and scheduling making communication challenging. Despite the brief evolving throughout the course of this project, the final outputs fit within a consistent series and identity for the musician while being distinct enough to engage and attract the full spectrum of Manaois’ fanbase.

“You’re super freaking talented at what you do and I’m grateful to be working with you and seeing these ideas come to life!”