Personal Branding Logo
A project that encompasses the visual representation of my branding and values as a Designer.
Product
Personal Branding Logo
Duration of the project
1 week
Purpose:
Personal branding project composed through mentorship with Susana Passinhas
My role
Visual Designer
Introduction
In order to create a strong personal brand, I decided to create a personalized graphic logo that encompasses my values as a designer: creativity, helping people, art, psychology, data-driven decision-making, attention to detail.
Representing my values and personality
Mood Board
For a better visualization of how my values reflect in my work, I created a mood board composed of all the elements that represent my personality, my inspirations and my work style as a designer.
I chose to create a transition from left to right, with different elements from my life building upon what becomes my source of inspiration when it comes to UX/UI design.
On the left side, you can find elements that serve as a big source of inspiration for me: happy memories, the artwork I have captured from my travels, perfumes, artistic shots from shows, and my favorite impressionist paintings.
In the middle of the board, you can see how I use those sources in my daily life: paintings, sketches, photos.
Lastly, on the right side of the board, you can find how the previous elements reflect my work style as a UX/UI Designer. You will find elements from my own projects, words that link to my values, color palettes I have composed based on inspiration sources, and other designer’s work I appreciate.
Exploring Design Elements
UX/UI Focused Mood Board
After the first mood board, I created a second one, focused on UX elements, such as colors, illustrations, work examples in order to build a decision-making process for my Logo.
Finding the right shape
Hand-drawn Sketches
After finding the right direction through my mood boards, I started sketching in Procreate some hand-drawn variations for my logo.
I wanted to take my letters and the material design logo and merge them into something that could reflect my personality as a designer: artistic, skillful, organized, clean, yet playful.
The letter R forms very subtly from lines that are not fully linked together. It lets the user’s mind and eyes complete the image alone, linking to the last piece of the puzzle when it comes to my values: psychology.
Bringing the sketches to ‘digital life’
Figma B&W Iterations
After experimenting with hand-drawn sketches, I created some digital black and white iterations.
In order to make the logo symbol easily readable from different dimensions, I tried to experiment and integrate geometrical forms in the composition. Morover, I played with different variations of the same elements taken into consideration: discontinued lines that are continued by the human eye, the letter R from my name hidden in the pencil form and the floating tip of the pencil.
While the floating triangle for the tip of the pencil was a good choice to integrate psychological optical illusions in the composition, the circle that could be formed by the curl in the letter R was an interesting addition, showing something that could lie beneath the appearances.
Experimenting with my color palette
Figma Color Iterations
After choosing the b&w iterations that best describe me and were the most visually appealing, I started adding color and I experimented with how I can integrate the full color palette.
Starting with the 2 b&w versions chosen on the left, I kept adding the colors from my palette and I kept switching between different proportions to see which are the most appealing.
After a few iterations with color, I decided to go with the hidden circle logo, because the composition was more playful and equilibrated, representing a better fit for my values.
The dark purple has great contrast on the light beige background and assures readability, the orange and pink represent the accents of the color palette. While both the accent colors are strong and vibrant, pink appears to be tamed down by the close vicinity with purple on the color system. Because of that and to ensure good readability of the letter R, I went with adding orange on the upper part of the logo.
The Final Look
The final iteration of the Logo contains both a color and a B&W version. The pencil is a clear message about my passions and artistic skills, the letter R personalizes the pencil and the carefully placed optical illusions represent a subtle reference to my psychology studies. The round edges and geometrical forms represent the perfect balance between playfulness and professionalism.
Reflections on the process
Challenges
The biggest challenge I faced during this project was to find out how I can embody a large number of values in a visual representation. Due to my rich number of values, some usually tend to be represented by opposite visual elements: creativity is usually represented by colorful images, round edges, and forms, while data-driven decision-making is represented by neatly aligned statistics, with very few color insertions.
Another challenge faced was integrating a color palette composed of quite a lot of intense hues colors in such a way that it would create an easily readable shape that would not strain the eye.
Learnings
Some key learnings I took from this project were:
basing my logo on my work values is a great way to kickstart the vision for the project and ensure continuity with the branding across all platforms,
having an extensive mood board that encompasses feelings, directives, and decisions is a great way to compose a decision flow based on critical thinking,
adding new elements to the original vision during the evolution of the process elevates my designs with the newly discovered ideas I gather along the way.
Check out my other projects!
Responsive Website Redesign after NGO rebranding
Designing a Logo based on Personal Branding
Creating the Visual Design for a Luggage Track App