Mango
This personal project began as a playful, sensory exploration of the mango—its shape, colour, and emotional resonance. What started as a quick sketch in my notebook became a broader investigation into how a single word and form could evolve into a full visual language, eventually imagined as a capsule collection of apparel and accessories.
Creative Intent
The mango, both as fruit and metaphor, carried rich associations for me: softness and strength, sweetness and heat, memory and mess. I wanted to capture its essence without being literal. The left page of the sketchbook introduced contour drawings to explore form and movement, while the right page built texture and saturation through crayon and pastel. This laid the foundation for a visual system rooted in abstraction and feeling rather than direct representation.
Design Translation
From Sketchbook to Streetwear
From the sketchbook, I extracted elements to build out a series of graphic interpretations. These were refined into a set of patterns, icons, and compositions that could live on fabric. The second image shows how these visuals were expanded into textile-ready forms, each tapping into a different facet of the original idea: seed, slice, skin, juice.
The mockups that follow imagine the concept applied across apparel and accessories: bold tote bags, oversized t-shirts, and bucket hats. Each item plays with scale, saturation, and rhythm. Colors were carefully chosen to reflect the heat and vibrancy of the fruit, while compositions were arranged to feel organic and confident.
The mockups that follow imagine the concept applied across apparel and accessories: bold tote bags, oversized t-shirts, and bucket hats. Each item plays with scale, saturation, and rhythm. Colors were carefully chosen to reflect the heat and vibrancy of the fruit, while compositions were arranged to feel organic and confident.
Why It Matters
Create without permission
This was never meant to go to market. It was about following a creative impulse from page to product, and allowing personal intuition to guide the design system. The project reminded me how much power lives in the smallest moments, how a single drawing can hold the seed of something much bigger. Mango is a reminder that inspiration does not need to be strategic to be meaningful. It just needs to be honest.
