R&P Post 57: Creating Merchandise for our Website!

Hello! Welcome back to my research and planning post! We have now started to create merchandise for the 'Merch' page of our website which I am responsible for creating. For this we have included a range of different products, including T-shirts, hoddies, posters and phone cases.

One of the products that we have created is a white T-shirt with a photo of Kati (we are planning to use this same photo for the front panel of our digipak) and her name alongside 'Love Like This' printed onto it:                                                                 

This product was created through Photoshop and below you can see screenshots taken from this process, demonstrating how it was created:

However, in the end we decided that we preferred just having 'Kati' written onto the phone case rather than 'Kati' and 'You Are The Solution', as it gave it a more simplistic and stylish aesthetic. This is what our final product now looks like:

After I had began to photoshop multiple different merchandise products, I came to realise that I was using the same basic process for all of them, meaning that I became more and more efficient with the different products that I created. Photoshop also became easier for me to use as I used it more and more, and I found that this was the main process I used for creating merchandise products through Photoshop:

• Step 1: Find an image of the product that you want to use via the internet.
• Step 2: Import this image into Photoshop and position it correctly (e.g. rotate or crop if necessary).
• Step 3: Write the text you want to use onto it and position it in the correct place.
• Step 4: Make sure that the text you have added appears to be part of the product by using any necessary opacity effects (e.g. darken, colour burn etc.) 
• Step 5: Add any of your own images you would like, e.g. the album cover for your artist. 
• Step 6: Repeat steps 3 and 4 for this new image. 
• Step 7: When you are satisfied that your product is finished, save it as a JPEG and then you are done!

Here are all of the merchandise products that we are going to use for the website:

Posters:

Music (Kati's debut album):

Phone cases:

T-shirts:

Hoodies:

From this wide range of merchandise, what you can see is how we have catered for different members of our target audience. Whilst we are aware that the majority of our target audience will be made up of young girls, we are also aiming our artist at teenage boys as well and we have done this by using a range of colours through our merchandise. For example, with the clothing we have used black and grey colours to appeal to the male part of our audience as well as our the female part of our audience, as grey and black are usually viewed as gender-neutral colours. However, in order to emphasise the marketing of our artist across to the female part of our audience, we have also included a pink hoodie in our merchandise, as the colour pink is often aimed at girls in the marketing world. 

From this task I have come to grips with some of the more technical aspects of Photoshop, such as using different tools including the eye dropper tool and the opacity tool. Creating this merchandise has taught me how to use Photoshop more effectively and as I have begun to familiarise myself with its various different tools, I have become more and more efficient in using this software.  

Come back again soon to hear more about how our website is coming along!