Creative Designer
LAGOS
My first-place design for the YAART x ASHLUXE Annual Design Competition, the official tee for ASHLUXE's 5th anniversary.
category
Art Direction
type
Creative Designer
Deliverable
Apparel Graphic, T-Shirt Design
ASHLUXE is one of Nigeria's most recognised luxury streetwear brands, and for their fifth anniversary they ran the YAART Annual Design Competition, a call to design the anniversary tee. I entered, and my design took first place.
YAART, the foundation behind it, is run by Yinka Ash, the founder of ASHLUXE, so winning meant being picked by the brand itself.
A fifth birthday worth showing off
Turning a milestone into a dreamy, celebratory graphic.
Five years is a milestone, so I treated the brief like a celebration you could wear. I built a dreamscape around the number five: a ferris wheel, a carousel, balloons, fireworks and soft clouds in a pastel palette, the kind of fairground fantasy that feels both playful and premium.
The centrepiece is a hand stacked with championship rings spelling out ASH, a nod to five years of the brand winning. Front and back were designed as one world, so the tee reads like a piece, not just a logo on cotton.
First place, picked by the brand
The design won first place and a $2,000 prize, judged and awarded by YAART in April 2024. More than the money, it was recognition straight from ASHLUXE and its founder, my work chosen as the face of a milestone for a brand I respect.
It is one of the wins I am proudest of.
Designing to be worn, and to win
Competition work sharpens you in a way client work cannot, you are not designing to a brief someone will accept, you are designing to stand out from everyone who wants it too. This one taught me to balance fantasy with restraint, to make something expressive enough to win but clean enough to wear every day.
It is proof that a strong idea, executed properly, gets noticed.
