Major Project - Merchandising
As a secondary part of my major project, I decided to produce some merchandise for Louie to accompany the album artwork. I treated this as a brand identity and tried to keep everything looking relatively similar. I took into count the stylistic choices I had made with the album artwork and made sure to incorporate things such as the same hand lettering.
I thought back to what merchandise has been popular when I have been to concerts before, and tried to put myself in the mindset of one of Louie’s audience members, assuming that the merch would be sold post-concert. I know that in the past I have bought items such as t-shirts and posters from concerts, but other items are also available such as tote bags, badges and lighters. Usually the most popular items are t-shirts and posters, as they are always the first to sell out. So I knew I wanted to produce these, and also decided to make some tote bags as well.
I researched some popular indie band’s merchandise in order to see if there was any correlation between them. I did this because Louie’s music also falls under this bracket and so I thought that they may have a similar target audience. I found that most designs were quite simplistic, with one colour being used for printing the design. The design itself was also quite simple, often with a bigger illustration accompanied by a smaller logo. Here are some examples:
And so because of this I decided to do a large illustration for the back of the shirt, with a small logo for the front. I also decided to keep the, simple and screen print them using one colour. For this I used a previous idea I had for an illustration to accompany Louie’s song Junky, where I had drawn a house with the light leaking out of one of the windows. I simply took this and adjusted it to make it appropriate to screen print. I also decided to add a line from the end of Louie’s song, in order to personalise the t-shirt a bit further. I also decided to use this design on the tote bags and for a poster as I thought it worked quite well as an overall composition. I also decided to give two colour options as I felt black and white wasn’t very in keeping with my style and use of colour on the album artwork. Here is the original idea I had, followed by the adjusted design and the finished products:
Overall I am very happy with how these pieces of merchandise turned out. I feel as though I expanded my knowledge when it came to screen printing and I found that simplifying my design made for a much more time effective process.
