Surveillance State

SURVEILLANCE STATE is a dystopian branding and merchandise concept built for the K-pop group KATSEYE, built around the line “We See You / You See Us.” Instead of the soft, glossy visual grammar K-pop branding usually reaches for, the project borrows from CCTV footage, thermal imaging, and classified documentation — security clearance cards instead of photocards, a “case file” instead of an album sleeve, a forensic archive instead of a photobook. The concept sits on a simple but loaded question: in fandom, who is actually watching whom? Fans study and decode every frame of an idol’s public life; idols and the systems around them study, anticipate, and shape fan behaviour in return. KATSEYE was chosen deliberately rather than at random — their public dynamic with fans already lives inside that mutual gaze, which made them the right group to build this world around. The project mattered as an attempt to take a piece of cultural criticism off the page and make it something tangible — a full merchandise line, not just an argument about parasocial dynamics.

I started small. A moodboard pulling together CCTV stills, thermal scans, paparazzi candids, and classified-file textures, to establish the tension I wanted — cold institutional surveillance sitting right up against the intimacy of fandom. Alongside it, a short ideation page, just two photocards, a CD, and a vinyl. That was genuinely all I had for a while.

The typography came next and did a lot of the narrative work: Chakra Petch as the primary face for its stencilled, technical quality, Share Tech Mono and OCR A Extended layered in to push the “classified document” feeling further. I kept the colour palette deliberately restrained — steel grey, black, with alarm green and red cutting through — so the surveillance metaphor stayed legible instead of becoming decoration.

A member card became a security clearance ID, complete with authorised signatures and issue years. The album became a “case file,” stamped REC and authorised-access-only. The photobook became a forensic archive — fingerprint scans on the cover, handprints on the back, a classification reference system stamped into it like evidence. The “surveillance log” group card carries timestamps, subject confirmations, a threat count, and a monitored status. The thermal-imaging vinyl pushed the bureaucratic, dehumanised tone the furthest of anything in the set. Mockups came last, once I needed to see whether the system actually held its logic across an album box, a CD, vinyl, and a photobook — whether it still felt like one coherent, classified world once it left the page.

I’d never done branding before — not really. Posters, layouts, editorial spreads, yes, but never an entire identity built from the ground up, where every product has to agree with every other product on what world it’s living in. That was the actual learning curve here, not the surveillance concept itself, but the discipline of identity: what holds a t-shirt and a vinyl sleeve and a member card together when they’re supposedly issued by the same fictional system.

KATSEYE wasn’t a random pick. I think about fan culture critically enough, often enough, that when I was choosing who to build this concept around, it had to be a group that was already living inside the dynamic I wanted to dramatise — that mutual, slightly invasive gaze between celebrity and fan, the way both parties are constantly watching, logging, interpreting the other. KATSEYE sits inside that so precisely that the concept almost felt less like an invention and more like a translation. I wasn’t making up a metaphor for parasocial surveillance; I was just finding the visual language for something that was already true.

What surprised me, honestly, is that it never tipped into feeling too dark or too dystopian to me. I went in almost expecting to have to pull it back at some point, soften an edge, make it more “brand” and less “case file.” But it landed exactly where I wanted — somewhere a real label could plausibly greenlight, and somewhere the concept’s teeth stayed intact. That balance is the part I’m proudest of.

The process itself started small, and at some point, I stopped treating it like a mood exercise and started asking how each piece would actually function as an object. That shift, from referencing an aesthetic to actually engineering it, is what taught me the most. I don’t just want to make concepts that look good in a moodboard. I want to know if they could be built.

If I’m honest, I wouldn’t change anything about what exists right now. I like it as it is. But I don’t think it’s finished, either — it doesn’t feel like a project with an ending so much as a world I could keep adding rooms to. Building something this fully, from scratch, where every object answers to the same internal logic — that’s the part of design I didn’t know I’d love this much. And it’s the part I most want to keep doing.