Petit Tembo is a powerful name that carries a powerful punch. In Swahili, Tembo means elephant. In English, Tembo means grief.

Ivana and Carla are the creative minds and founders behind Petit Tembo. They have traveled to more countries then the average soul and found themselves in Africa on their last trip. The African elephant is under severe threat from poaching, habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict. Ivana and Carla had every intention doing everything they could to support these gentle creatures.

Being artists themselves, they wanted to use their creative minds to support the elephants and local African children. They decided on a line of shirts that were inspired by the equally innocent minds of children and enlisted their help by asking them to draw pictures of elephants. In return, raised funds from these illustrations are given back to help protect both the children and the animals.

I was brought onto the team to develop the t-shirt illustrations as well as design the additional branded packaging pieces including business cards, hang tags and a branded sticker. It was important that the original hand-drawn elements of the elephants were kept intact while digitizing them into a sale-able product.

Their branding for Petit Tembo has an extremely clean and minimalist approach making use of only black typography and an incredible amount of white breathing space. Each pixel of each letter has been meticulously placed to ensure the typography alone could carry the weight of such an important message. This was particularly important with the tagline Cultivating Compassion.