PPP Personal Branding & Promotional Pack

For my Personal branding this year I decided to start doing my research into existing logos which I liked and related to my style of work, on my design context blog.

For my Personal branding and promotional pack this year I wanted to design something which represented me as a designer and also reflected my practice within graphic design.

Before I started to design I looked back on the work I had done throughout this year in addition to work I had done outside of university.

After having reflected on my work, I had picked up on a few things which stood out from my work. 

From majority of the briefs and projects I had took on this year logotypes were one thing which I really enjoyed designing, along with branding in general, icon design and print design.

I decided to utilize these strengths, and incorporate them when designing my logo. I had started with creating some logos with my initials in styles similar to some of the logos I had seen when doing research. I hand rendered the design first.

I then went over them in pen and eventually digitally recreated them. I had simply used the pen tool on illustrator to construct the logos along with the type tool.

When it came to choosing a font for the logo I wanted something which was fairly minimal but not a font which has been overused in other logos or branding. I liked the look of the Gothic font family as it was similar to the font I had used last year in my branding, which was the Nexa.

I had played around with some of the logos, developing them from the hand drawn ones. I was still unsure which logo I was going to use but I figured that choosing a colour was something which would take a while so I started to put the logo I liked the most at the times through different colour schemes to see what worked. 

I started using a bright florescent green as I thought this was a decent representation of what people describe me as a person, loud, bright and green being my favourite colour. The only problem I realised using a colour like this was the fact that I would find it hard trying to get it reproduced through CMYK printing as I would have had to use vinyl on all the printed materials in order to keep a consistency of colour. 

This was obviously not very practical so I started to see what the closest CMYK match to that was, in addition to this I wanted to make sure that RGB of the colour was also websafe, as I was going to be using this logo across online social media platforms such as twitter, tumblr and on my portfolio on behance and my website. With this in mind it really opened my eyes to why choosing a colour is a very crucial part of designing a brand and identity.

As you can see I tried a few different greens in RGB and CMYK with gamut warning correction. I also did a grayscale of the colour to see what it would have looked like if I could not print in colour.

I left choosing the colour aside for a moment as it was going to take longer than I thought and figured it would be easier once I had chosen a logo first.

Apart from the logos being representative of my style of work I did not have much of concept behind most of them. This was when I decided to incorporate a question mark to some of the logos to represent my second name, ‘Mistry’. I quite liked this idea and I did have a logo design with a question mark in it, but did not think it would have worked at the time. After having added meaning to it I slightly altered the existing logo with the question mark, adding some geometric shapes and playing around with the partitions which create the question mark.

I ended up choosing the logo with the square around the logotype, but at a 45 degree angle. The four corners of the square represent the 4 areas of design I like to think are my speciality, Branding, Logotypes, Print and Icon design.

With a logo chosen I decided to continue choosing a colour. I did some quick research into colour theory. I started to use an orange instead of the green as it is often used to symbolism creativity, youth and is in the middle of red and yellow so it’s also used to draw attention but not alert or alarm.I tried a florescent orange but did not think it would have been suitable for the logo I chose.

I ended up choosing a deep almost warm red orange, as I liked how it almost did look red but you definitely knew it was an orange. The colour was also a websafe RGB and could be reproduced in CMYK with the gamut warning correction.

With the overall logo and identity chosen I just needed to apply it across suitable media. When it came to choosing what to apply it to I stuck to items I use, as I did not think it would have been as effective if I applied across things I did not really use. 

I had decided on using a notepad, Invoice, Letterhead and envelope along with my CV.

I had kept the design of the invoice fairly similar to the one I had done last year for my personal branding along with my letterhead. 

For the business cards I had tried a few different layouts as I was not too sure how I wanted it, apart from having a logo on one side and details on the other.

After having experiment with a few different layouts I settled for this one:

For my creative CV I wanted something which was in line with work I had done in the past. I had thought of a few different ideas, but due to not having a lot of time I quickly decided on doing a folder poster which would have my details on one side with examples of my work on the other.

I had decided to use a similar layout to the posters I had design for the Design for print module as I was going to folding the poster in a similar way.

I only wanted to include information that clients would want to see, which was design skills, previous education and qualifications and example of work and clients I had worked with. I also included a short paragraph which I thought summed me up.

I kept the layout of the back side of the poster in line with the folds so that its easy for the person to read and view. I included examples of work I had done throughout the years at LCA.

For items I could not print onto I used vinyl which was the same colour to apply my branding to. These items were the envelopes and the notepad, I also used it on the poster in the corner.

For the website I wanted something which was simple and was easy for the user to get to all the crucial bits of information. I did some quick research into existing portfolio websites to get an idea of what was already out there.

Due to leaving things quite late I had to go straight into designing the wireframe on InDesign.

I used the guides as a grid to ensure a consistent layout of the website. I began by adding the logo, which would double as a homepage button and a nav bar.

Keeping to this grid I designed the rest of the page and how the photos will go on them along with the other pages.

These were the final images of my identity/ personal branding.