Emanuel Ilagan

Creative + Art Direction, Design

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Emanuel brings extensive experience across graphic and communication design, art direction, and strategic consulting, with partnerships spanning arts & culture, beauty, retail, and tech.

Selected WorkWithTypeYear
Meet You There CampaignSquareProduct Campaign2025
Evergreen Asset Library DevelopmentSquareArt Direction2023–25
Square for Beauty Overview VideoSquareArt Direction2025
&CEO Beauty Ambassador ProgramSquareBrand Design2024
Built for Beauty EventSquareExperiential Design2024
Live By The Sword TestimonialSquareArt Direction2022
Foot Locker × New Balance NB204L Launch Eventbread.xmExperiential Design2026
Musee CorporationBruce Mau DesignBrand Design2021
Tone Study: Issue OnePalm Wine StudiosEditorial Design2020
Patrick Ta BeautyConcrete DesignBrand + Packaging Design2018
Cougar ShoesConcrete DesignBrand + Packaging Design2017–18
Perricone MDConcrete DesignBrand + Packaging Design2015–17
Babak Golkar Artist CatalogueEduce DesignEditorial Design2015

Meet You There Campaign

Square

Product Campaign2025

Square's first upmarket unified audience campaign — across food & beverage, retail, beauty, and professional services — built to shift perception among sellers who had outgrown the assumption that Square is a tool for the smallest businesses. Seasonal flights combined high-impact print, precision-targeted paid media, trade publications, podcasts, and seller-led testimonials, anchored by a campaign landing page. Photo and video production spanned four cities and ten businesses, art-directed to hold a single visual language across four verticals and ten very different business types. As creative lead, direction spanned creative, strategy, and lead design — presenting the work, coordinating the team, and approving and designing output before escalation to our creative director, while remaining hands-on throughout.

Associate Creative Director
ACD, Copy: Mike Grover
Designers: Kate Byrne, Aubrey Emlyn, Cristina Keane, Mio Yoshigawa
Copywriters: Laura Kelly, Carson Rounds
Sr. Project Manager: Aubre Pierce-Lackey
Producer: Shayna Wacker
Creative Strategist: Chane Rennie
Creative Director: Jess Williams
Photography: Ashley Armitage, Michael Kusumadjaja
Production Agencies: Bone & Gold, Huffman Creative

Evergreen Asset Library Development

Square

Art Direction2023–25

Three years of seller photo and video capture across food and beverage, beauty, services, and retail — barbershops, med-spas, nail salons, plant nurseries, apparel boutiques, and cafés. Casting, pre-production, shot lists, on-set art direction, and post-production selects across six cities, introducing a documentary format that captured roaming b-roll alongside stills and set the art direction standard for Square's brand shoots. Designers new to production were brought onto set and through the selects and retouching process, extending the format beyond a single art director. Assets deployed across national campaigns, product pages, sales enablement, and paid social. 300+ images approved for cross-functional go-to-market use.

Associate Creative Director
Art Directors: Aubrey Emlyn, Patrick McDonald, Daniel Mui, Mio Yoshigawa
Creative Director: Jess Williams
Producers: Agnes Arceo, Erin McGovern, Michelle Mintz, Shayna Wacker
Photography: Ashley Armitage, Michael Kusumadjaja, Alex Lau, Vishal Marapon, Michael Schmelling, Brad Torchia, Courtney Sofiah Yates

Square for Beauty Overview Video

Square

Art Direction2025


A 60-second video for the Square for Beauty overview page, making the case for what the product actually does for beauty sellers. Where the category tends to explain itself through animation, icons, and UI, our approach stays in real salons and studios — so the software feels like part of the workplace instead of a screen recording. The video was cut entirely from evergreen footage and built modularly so UI could be swapped and the piece localized without a reshoot, with cutdowns for paid media and the sales team. We conducted a full audit of Square's existing video assets, establishing the framework for a reference library the team could build upon.

Associate Creative Director
ACD, Copy: Mike Grover
Producer: Shayna Wacker
Creative Director: Jess Williams
Video Editing and Production: Hornet Studio

&CEO Beauty Ambassador Program

Square

Brand Design2024

Developed the &CEO brand concept and identity for Square's 2024 beauty ambassador program — naming, positioning, custom-drawn ampersand wordmark, moodboard, and ambassador profile framework — then led design across the full program build-out: welcome kit (wax-seal packaging, apparel, tech accessories, printed program one-pager), digital assets (program PDF, email, social kit), brand trip swag basket and activation content, campaign launch materials, and post-trip milestone gifting across five ambassadors.

Associate Creative Director
ACD, Copy: Mike Grover
Copywriter: Carson Rounds
Product Marketing Manager: Sangwon Yoon

Built for Beauty Event

Square

Experiential Design2024

Evening keynote and seller panel with hairstylist Chris Appleton, whose clients include Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and Ariana Grande. Art direction and design across venue, floor plan, lighting, florals, decks, signage, sales collateral, giveaway concepts, projection-mapped video, and landing page. 150 registrations, 73 sellers in attendance, one $1M+ GPV seller closed on-site.

Associate Creative Director
ACD, Copy: Mike Grover
Sr. Project Manager: Bridget Dodds-Morvant
Producer: Melanie Wells
Experiential Agency: Momentum Worldwide
Video Production: BANG

Live By The Sword Testimonial

Square

Art Direction2022

Existing tattoo parlor imagery in the asset library was stock-sourced, inauthentic, and undifferentiated; the shoot centred on a real seller to bring the true texture of the category into the photography. Sole art director and on-set creative approver across photo and video tracks running concurrently — a hero long-form video, four short-form cuts, eleven Shop the Setup videos, a social cut-down, and foundational photography at three locations. Wrote the creative groundwork document, selected photographer and director from treatment bids, built shot lists and paper-edit scripts, conducted seller interviews, and delivered final photo selects and a video graphics package to the edit team. Resulting testimonial graphic system was adopted by Square’s Brand team as an org-wide visual standard.

Senior Art Director
Copywriter: Carson Rounds 
Group Creative Director: Carly Moore
Integrated Producer: Alexander Friedman
Director: Ryan Chun
Photographer: Michael Kusumadjaja
Production Agency: Greenpoint Pictures

Foot Locker × New Balance NB204L Launch Event

bread.xm

Experiential Design2026


An invitation-only evening launch for the New Balance 204L, staged as a curated event centered around a floral workshop led by Toronto-based artist, Seden Lai. The work required a co-branded identity with a print and signage system that ran from the street to the takeaways: sidewalk check-in signage, threshold and mirror graphics, large-format installation typography, menu cards, and workshop collateral.

Freelance Creative Lead
Event Producers: Janaan Issaka, Michael Nyarkoh, Patricia Yeboah
Experiential Agency: bread.xm

Musee Corporation

Bruce Mau Design

Brand Design2021

A visual identity for a Japanese manufacturer of household and commercial goods, developed alongside the construction of a new head office in Nakatsugawa City. Leading a team of two designers while contributing directly to the system. Built a bold graphic language positioned against a conservative competitive set — a confident blue that reads as anything but corporate, anchored by a mark that nods to the company's origins in electric fan manufacturing.

Creative Lead
Designers: Lucas Hoang, Sohee Yoo
Creative Director: Kyosuke Nishida
Account Director: Marla Garderis
Chief Creative Officer: Laura Stein
Design Agency: Bruce Mau Design

Tone Study: Issue One

Palm Wine Studios

Editorial Design2020

Tone Study is an editorial magazine from Palm Wine Studios, a Toronto collective building Black representation and range into storytelling. Design consulting on the publication expanded into ownership of layout and print production, with the system built to serve the editorial content and give future issues a foundation to build from.

Freelance Designer
with Palm Wine Studios
Editors: Nana Adu-Poku & Michael Nyarkoh

Patrick Ta Beauty

Concrete Design

Brand + Packaging Design2018

 Lead designer on the debut line from celebrity makeup artist Patrick Ta, translating his signature glow into a packaging system built on rose gold. Owned packaging concepts, art direction, and launch campaign creative across the brand's introduction.

Lead Designer
Chief Creative Officer: Diti Katona
Agency: Concrete Design
On-figure Photography: Jason Kim
Off-figure Photophaphy: Blaise Misiek

Cougar Shoes

Concrete Design

Brand + Packaging Design2017–18

Brand refresh for the Canadian footwear label founded in 1948, built on the platform "Always Waterproof." Redrawn wordmark and brand guidelines, product-forward photography art direction, and a graphic and campaign language system extended across website, lookbooks, shoebox and hangtag design, stationery, trade show booths and environmental graphics, POP risers, digital and print advertising, and a brand video. Engagement converted to an ongoing retainer.
Lead Designer
Brand Manager: Julia Farabee
Creative Director: Jordan Poirier
Chief Creative Officer: Diti Katona
Agency: Concrete Design

Perricone MD

Concrete Design

Brand + Packaging Design2015–17

Two years as lead designer on Concrete's largest retainer account, extending an established brand system for the skincare label — a contemporary reading of the apothecary ethos the original 1997 line was built on. Work spanned packaging, campaign and visual content development, photo and video direction, and environmental design for retail.
Lead Designer
Brand Manager: Aurora Ratcliff
Chief Creative Officer: Diti Katona
Agency: Concrete Design

Babak Golkar Artist Catalogue

Educe Design

Editorial Design2015

Bidirectional layout system for a West Vancouver Museum artist book spanning three Golkar installations — Dialectic of Failure, Time to Let Go…, and Of Labour, Of Dirt. Farsi and English set in parallel across a grid resolving both reading directions, with language systems and visual forms mirroring the dialogic structure of the work itself.

Freelance Designer
with Designer: Katie Dixon
Creative Direction: Solveig Johanesson
Studio: Educe Design
©2026 Emanuel Alec IlaganLast updated: 2026/08
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