Unmastered is a podcast, a zine and a brand built around candid conversations about creativity, identity and personal growth. It features creatives of colour from Toronto to Nigeria. The self-set brief was to avoid the polished, algorithm-driven look of most podcast brands. It needed to feel handmade, warm and human, while still being legible and coherent as a system.

I led the creative direction across every touchpoint: the identity, the podcast artwork, the social presence, the zine series, and the photography, set design and video. I worked with a group of creatives spanning Toronto to Nigeria. Before we recorded a single episode, we wrote a manifesto together. Its principles guided our conversations, our creative choices and the moments of uncertainty along the way.

Instead of the usual clean sans-serif and bold colour, I made my own handwriting the main brand mark. That made the identity personal and hard to copy. I also designed three logo variations (UNM, unmastered and (un)mastered) to reflect the idea of having many selves within one person. Throughout, I put emotional consistency ahead of visual uniformity.

The system covers the logo and wordmarks, podcast cover art and episode graphics, and a social media system. The six zine issues follow their own rule: each one looks different, but they all clearly belong together.

The result is an identity people recognise across platforms, and a zine series that has built its own editorial following. The photography and design read as one visual world.