Miggie Bacungan’s graphic design challenges the artificial flavouring of pop culture imagery

Miggie Bacungan is part of It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2025 – a curated list of next generation creative talent from across the globe. Discover all 65 creatives in our directory, here.

Miggie Bacungan is a freelance multidisciplinary designer and a visual communication student currently based in Parañaque, Philippines, whose illustrations are utilised across packaging design, visual identities, editorial and motion designs and graphic elements. What Miggie does is “simulate real life scenarios”, using design as a means of storytelling and world building, creating a type of organised chaos, an ordered maximalism contoured by 2000’s nostalgia and hyper-saturated colours.

“The design elements I would use for my maximalist work takes inspiration from tarpaulin advertisements and posters you would see across Metro Manila. The visual character of these advertisements are really kitsch,” says Miggie. His project Artificial Flavouring draws from sign posters and street food vendors, Jeepney decals with Catholic imagery collaged across different pop culture references, and bootleg images you can find at palengkes (local street markets) and ukay-ukays (secondhand clothing markets). The end product looks like a model city made out of vibrant instant noodle packets!

His project Kain Tayo draws from the rising inflation rates of the Filipino economy and “how humans would start and resort to eating inedible objects due to the inhumane food costs”. Miggie isn’t looking at the endearing kitsch of the 2000s with rose-tinted glasses, he’s also seeing corruption for what it is, exposing a dark poverty underneath low-grade advertisements in poor economies by using unconventional typefaces and cluttered compositions. With an unique style cultivated across several projects, this up-and-comer is using graphic design to more than merely represent our visual culture, but challenge it.