Projects
Barnini
Creative Partner
Overview
Barnini is an early stage clothing startup building a youth-focused apparel identity through graphic T-shirts, expressive visuals, and designer-led drops. I worked with the brand as a creative partner, contributing T-shirt graphics, mockup explorations, product ideas, and visual directions for future collections.
My role focused on creating wearable graphics that could feel expressive, culturally familiar, and commercially appealing to a young audience. Across the designs, I explored music references, bold typography, distressed textures, illustrated figures, oversized compositions, and T-shirt colorways that could help the brand build a stronger visual language.
Project Type:
Apparel graphics, product mockups, startup brand collaboration
Brand:
Barnini — early-stage clothing / T-shirt startup
My role:
Creative Partner, T-shirt Graphic Designer
Contribution:
Designed around 15 T-shirt concepts, created mockups, explored product themes, typography, colorways, and future design directions
Audience:
Youth fashion audience, streetwear-inspired buyers, music and graphic T-shirt consumers
Visual direction:
Bold, expressive, slightly grunge/streetwear-inspired, music-led, typography-heavy, illustration-focused
Output:
T-shirt graphics, mockup visuals, theme explorations, design ideas for future drops
Collaboration type:
Paid startup collaboration, per-design contribution
The world behind the game
The designs were created for a youth audience that connects with expressive fashion, music references, visual nostalgia, and statement-based clothing. Instead of treating the T-shirt as only a surface for decoration, I approached each design as a small visual story, something that could be recognized, worn, photographed, and remembered.
One direction explored music-led graphics, where selected lines and moods from well known songs were translated into illustrated compositions, distressed textures, and bold typography. Other designs experimented with mythic figures, dramatic silhouettes, halftone effects, oversized back prints, and muted or washed T-shirt colors. The goal was to create pieces that felt visually strong but still wearable, balancing graphic impact with product appeal.
worldbuilding to gameplay
Alongside the graphics, I also explored how Barnini could shape future drops through themes, T-shirt colors, typography styles, and visual categories. Since the brand was still in an early stage, the work was less about following an existing brand system and more about helping test what kind of visual language could connect with its audience.
This project helped me think more commercially as a designer, how a graphic sits on fabric, how scale changes the attitude of a product, how typography affects wearability, and how mockups can help a young brand imagine its product direction before production.
