Objective: To design my personal brand logo and style guide.
I would like to start off saying I really enjoyed designing my own logo! How can I design a logo or symbol that encompasses my eclectic interests and personality all in one?
Well, I started by thinking about features about myself that I strongly identified with:
- Programmer
- Creative
- Engineer of Ideas
- Artist
- Ecologist
- Small
- Hair in bun
- Glasses
- Dominican
- Happy
- Nerdy
My first instinct was to incorporate ASCII Art. Ascii Art is a drawing made only with characters found in the ASCII Table (aka your keyboard). I played around with typing my name in a Text to Ascii Generator. These are the fonts shown from top to bottom: Goofy, Doh, Isometric2, and Small Keyboard.
I started exploring with the idea of making an icon of myself out of ASCII characters. Since I am not the best illustrator, I decided to use my Memoji as a foundation. Using Photoshop, I isolated the features most important to me in order to create a silhouette of myself.
I used a website that converts images to ASCII Art to achieve the image below.
It felt boring and dull, with no dimensionality to it so I explored using words as the characters that would fill in the outline of my head. I discovered a website called WordArt.com that allows you to create word cloud art. It has such a great interface and gives you a lot of control over your design. First, I tried just using my name as the words that would fill in my silhouette. However, it felt unoriginal and cliche so I decided to fill it in with some of the words I listed at the beginning of my design process: Programmer, Creative, Artist, Environmental Activist, 0s, and 1s. The font I used for the words is League Gothic.
I showed this to my boyfriend and he suggested my bun needs to be more round and defined since my bun is always so tall on my head. I agree that my bun adds a few inches to my appearance! Using Photoshop, I edited my Memoji silhouette to make my bun bigger and then fed the image into the word art website. After manipulating the settings, I achieved my final logo design! The colors can be inverted to fit a dark background.
For my color palette, I generated 5 colors using the Coolors website. I chose a grayscale palette for my portfolio website because I want the pop of color to come from my images and projects.
I had a hard time choosing typography for my personal style guide. I used Google Fonts and this article to help me choose the best font pairings for my needs. I chose Open Sans for its simplicity and clarity and Raleway for its intricate w.
I also toyed with the possibility of creating a stylized separator or footer for my website that consists of 0s and 1s in the font League Gothic (same as the logo).
Overall, I am really happy with how everything turned out and I am excited to implement my design on my website!
