DESIGNING for
THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTIVE
was created by my friend Tyrus Yeo, as a way to get creative people to spend time away from work and school and tune into their hobbies and projects. Meeting on Sundays at 8pm at someone’s living room, we shared our projects and weekly progress from each session.
Projects ranged from building robots, creating brands, learning to crochet, and writing stories or poems. I personally used to time to improve my art skills, having lost skill over time in college.
The Midnight Collective
Working on the Brand
When Tyrus asked me to help create merch for the first drop, there was a bit of pressure because the community’s brand was being developed around the same time. I had to get a good understanding of what TMC meant to people and understand what the core team had in mind for it’s future.
The merch was going to be the first of TMC’s merch drops. The goal was to have a space for artists to submit their work to be put on clothes that TMC can then facilitate. So this first drop was to symbolize the club, my work, and set a precedent for future artists in the club.
I started with collecting the vision of the core team, seeing what elements they like in Merch, what elements they associate with the community and jump in from there
Original Concepts
My process starts with free ideas sketching my own ideas from the information I gathered, because often times, people don’t know what they want and trust you to fill in the gaps as a designer. Below are some concepts of what TMC’s vibe translated to me, when told that most people didn’t want typical student org merch. This took me to big and bold streetwear/graphic hoodies as inspiration, not bounded by restrictions by the manufacturer or cost for the first iterations. This helped core team visualize bigger when I ran this against them .
It starts with a sketch without limitations.
Because of this process, our moodboard was able to look like this
From this, I took away some common themes. Most people wanted text to be display as a graphic, and for an embroidered sleeve that alluded to TMC. Most people wanted graphics that were unconventional or placed in a unique spaces.
Through refinement and various cycles of iteration we finalized a few versions of the hoodie
Currently the order is on pause during the break in the school year but will be picked up when the direction of the community is solidified in the coming months.