• A cat clothing brand, marketed towards cat owners who are looking for durable and practical clothing for their cat

• Designs a brand identity, and at least 2 collections

• Focuses on Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Clothing and Textiles, Pet Clothing, Marketing

- Feedback for Idea 1:

• Aj.Rob suggested researching the market more to see if this product is actually needed in Thailand.

• Is the problem with cat clothing culture specific?

• Consider the weather conditions of Thailand when designing the product. If it is functional but not practical for hot weather or humid then it is useless for cat owner in Thailand.

• Focuses on marketing aspect too not just aesthetic, research market and suitable advertisement. Do not forget to research the platform.

This artist's art style is similar to what I had in mind when my tutor asked which art style i wanted to do.

I want to try and do something similar to this but keep it vectorized and play with the color and contrast.

• APPA’s 2025 State of the Industry report shows pet ownership reaching 94 million U.S. households as Gen Z

• 70% of Gen Z pet owners have two or more pets

• 38 % of Gen Z in the U.S. are cat owners

This state of the industry report supports my theory that a lot of Gen Z are adopting/getting cats of their own. Making Gen Z the perfect target audience for this zine project.

https://today.line.me/th/v3/article/eLYYQ5O

• แม่แมว พ่อแมวเจนซีเป็นแรงขับเคลื่อนสำคัญของตลาดแมวทั่วโลก แม้ว่าหลายคนในกลุ่มนี้อาจยังไม่มีบ้านหรือครอบครัว แต่กลับให้ความสำคัญกับสัตว์เลี้ยงเป็นอย่างมาก

  Gen Z cat mom/dad are the main driving force behind the cat market industry. Many of the people from this group may not have their own home or family yet but they treat pets with the best care they can.

• กลุ่มเจนซีในตลาดโลกใช้จ่ายเฉลี่ยสูงถึง 72,624 บาท ต่อปี หรือ ประมาณ 6,052 บาท ต่อเดือน

  Gen Z spends an average of 72,624 Baht per year / 6,052 baht per month on their pet

vector, sometimes traditional, uses vibrant color but not many color

artist 2 : schinako moriyama

hand drawn, some texture, soft color background, nature, layout with minimal text

artist 3: leebom (@o_l_bom on x)cartoonish & minimal, big eyes, emoticons, uses 3-5 color, plain white background

After more research on the art style I want to focus on, I realized that I want it to have more texture. Vector art work with texture is nice, but it is not the texture I’m looking for. I like texture of brush strokes, so I decided to make illustration on procreate instead of adobe illustrator.

Minimal cartoonish cats, no mouth, only eyes and whiskers, uses color to make the design pops.

I will have to research more on color and printing techniques this week. Riso is interesting but I have to research some more on the printing places and costs.

On week 4 I will focus on layout and narrative. The project layout first draft should be done by week 5-6.

• cat hiding poses

• ways you should not pull cats

So, I have changed my plans from focusing on layout and narrative to focusing on character design, character sheet, and silhouette study for this week. I will add layout sketches/design to this week's work too.

We are on the same page that first draft should be done by week 5 or 6.

1. Hachiware, chiikawa 2. Toro, doko demo issyo 3. Hello Kitty, sanrio 4. Pipi, the legend of pipi 5. the legend of Hei 6. Skip & Loafer 7. Nights with a cat 8. Chi 9. Turbo Baba cat version, Dandadan 10. The cat emoji i use on Facebook

Looking at these big eyes cat character and their structure helped me improve my character design. I found that using a rounded face feature with big rounded eyes dilated pupils works the best for the project.

Experimented with different eyes shape and different kind of round faces.

It is still a work in progress as I have not made a proper character sheet, I will do that before starting the illustration.

I'm putting everything on hold and will prepare a presentation for the work check session.

If possible I want to give out this zine at the pet hospital, cat cafe, and adoption places.

I adjusted some of the facial expression, it is a bit different from the sketch. I want to still show the cuteness of a kitten even when angry, or crying so I tried to make it cute but expressive at the same time.

Picture above is the sketch I am going to work on for the final piece, there might be some alterations... I want the zine to be a bit more interactive.

1. Introduction

2. How to prepare a space for cat

3. Handling a cat, what to do when they hide

4. How to be friend the cat

5. Playing with cat the correct way

6. Food & Water

7. Hygiene (Litter, Baths, Cleaning)

8. Healthcare

Hello Kitty originally is created to be just a design on gift items; coin purse, pen, etc. As time pass Hello Kitty gained popularity in the fashion industry. Hello Kitty and fashion industry especially the kawaii culture and Japanese fashion in general have been growing side by side for over 40 years now. This year marks Hello Kitty's 50th Anniversary.

Now Hello Kitty has her own story/narrative, appears in every household item possible, took over fashion industry, and even has her own themed park. Every few months we see new Hello Kitty collaboration and they are almost always unexpected; Hello Kitty X Butterbear X 7-Eleven Thailand for example.

Recommended by Aj.Rob I looked into the exhibition. From the research I learn that this exhibition is aimed towards defining the word cute. Most of the pieces shown at the exhibition are cats themed, cute. There are rooms/areas dedicated to each topics. Cats, AI Cats, Sanrio Hello Kitty 50th years celebration, Kawaii culture, and more.

top: NEKOGAO by Mitsuaki Iwago

bottom: internet cats, pinterest, tiktok, fb, twitter(x) and more

They also had a lot of festive pet toys, cats and dogs mostly.

Character design wise, culcat did well. They established this silly cat design everywhere on their social media platform and even created a story for them to be recognized by cat lover tourists and local in Vietnam.

• for this part tutor suggested that I could show more of a cat emotion by adding the tail of the cat in frame.

• she also suggested that I should make the cat a bit smaller as it takes up too much space and makes the page feels cramped.

• I had checked the cute exhibition by somerset house

• Researched a little bit about Kawaii culture, specifically hello kitty appearance and relation to Kawaii culture

• I finished creating the cat character for the main narrative and have a character sheet

• Currently looking into publishing digital zine first then publish physical ones after

• For now I am looking at books I have access to. Good book padlet is still not available to me as I do not have the email needed for it.

We looked into publishing the zine online. There are some websites that allows you to publish a flipbook type of thing.

• I want to use this method to publish my work for now as I do not have time to finish the work soon enough that it can be printed. In the future I would like to print it out.

My tutor suggested that for my independent enquiry I could continue researching the kawaii culture and cats.

• I probably will go with that, but I'm going to look at some more topics that are related to cats, cuteness, and fashion too.

I was supposed to go to the Bangkok Illustration Fair at Central World as a part of my research but things came up and I do not have time to go.

• An educational zine for people who just adopted new kitten, a guide on how to care for them

• I was inspired from my experience when adopting my first cat "Audi". I was given a guide book, the one shown in the picture. While it was useful and helped me, it was a bit difficult to understand with limited visualization and no proper text layout.

• Goal is to make it easy to understand for people who never owned a cat

• Make it more visually pleasing

• Arrange the text

• Research some more and adds useful information I have gained from owning a cat

• Focuses on Graphic Design, Typography, Illustration, and Layout

- Feedback for Idea 2:

• Ajarn suggested that I look at Louis Wain's work if I wanted to go with vibrant color

• Try to focus on making the first page of the zine to show at the first meeting with tutor

• Finds a direction and style for the zine

• Focus on this idea first as a mini project and leave the first Idea for later.

• Chapter 2, cats in culture, specifically the cats in literature, cats in art, and cats in entertainment part to look at how cats were portrayed in different kind of medias. This significantly helped me with my character design process.

• Chapter 3, Feline Biology. Cat anatomy.

• Chapter 5, caring for your cat. This chapter helped me decide on what to add for my zine and to make sure the information I had from my experience with cats is accurate.

• Chapter 4, What Makes a Cat. In this chapter of the book, it explained about how human finds cat visually pleasing, how cats evolved into pets and human's obsession with cat's cuteness.

• In this book there is a lot of cat drawings which I find is nice to look at. They have accurate cat poses which I used as part of the references for character design and illustration process.

Overall it was a great experience to get to do this as a par of my 4th year. I want to make a new version of this zine during the break.

• helped with color choices

• The book is about how to draw cats like the famous Bichi Mao style. Useful techniques on how to draw cartoon cats, easy to learn.

• Further research on kawaii culture and how it influenced the character designs of Japanese media.

text layout will be adjusted once I import all illustration to InDesign