Personal Branding
Things to Figure Out
As a graphic designer looking for projects to sharpen one’s skills, it only makes sense to start with creating a personal brand. This presents itself with the extra commitment of coming up with an aesthetic that I am willing to stick to long-term. I had to think about not only my favorite fonts or symbols, but also ones that would work well enough together that it might represent myself as an independent artist.
business card image
business card text
Inspiration and Reference
After some (well, a lot) of thinking it over, I decided to stick with pretty simple figures as my icons; a snail and an eye. To go with these, I stuck with a bold serif main font (American Typewriter), with a simple sans serif body font (Degular Display).
Why go with the snail and eye as my icons? I needed a concept for icons that were flexible, so I could change the design and layout up over time, if I decided. I also wanted to pick things that I had an interest in or found aesthetically pleasing.
The colors, shades of green and orange, were bright yet earthy, which felt like it went with the overall calm and positive tone that I wanted to portray with my personal art brand.
finished brand guidelines
Final Execution
Now that I knew what I wanted, I just needed to go and create it. I had sketched several variations of simplified snails and eyes before settling on the current combo. The general shapes of the icons and text were stackable, so it could translate to either a longer or taller format easily. At the time I was figuring that out, I also tweaked the orientation of these figures to make a small, circular secondary logo. This was perfect for anything that could use a small logo stamped in the corner.
variants of the primary logo
variants of the logo mark