"Take the mood board you created in the last lesson task and now create your personal brand logo.). The styles I chose to work with is minimal and elegant. As I mentioned on that last post I recently
When it comes to determining your personal brand, no one knows better than yourself whether you’re traditional, trendy or tough.
Create a unique typeface accompanied by an icon or symbol that showcases you - or an aspect of you - as a brand. You are free to choose whether you want to add a tag line or not."
For this task I have to create a personal logo for my brand following the mood board I made on my last blog post (Link). The styles I chose to work with is minimal and elegant. As I mentioned on that last post I recently upgraded my personal website to this style, so I needed a logo to match with it. Although I have already created the icon logo for my brand in this post I will walk trough the process of coming up with the idea for it + creating a full logo that includes my name, tagline and the icon.
So the full story starts a few years ago with my desire to showcase my best photos in a personal gallery ,other than social media. I wanted to create my own website and I knew that I needed a name and logo for it. After I did some research on how to do that, I figured out that Squarespace was one of the most popular platforms to make a website with and of course I decided to give it a try. For a logo I found a website that you could make a simple personal logo with for free. For that first time I picked a bird silhouette in addition to my name, but of course I was aware that it's a fixed illustration that everyone was free to use and therefore not unique, though it did the job for a while. Around this time I also booked and purchased my own domain, because I did not want any additional names on my site other than my own. After trying to figure out Squarespace for some time, I found it very complicated and did not have enough time to try to understand it any further, so I stopped my work on it.
That lasted until I enrolled in Noroff as a graphic design student. As I mentioned before my main reason for doing this course is to find a way to combine my photos and artistic mind and hopefully make that my job one day. On the first day of school we were told that we are going to need a personal blog to write our tasks and progress during the semesters. I then decided to try again to create my own website with my photo gallery and have the blog included in it too.
As I had given up on Squarespace already, I searched for alternatives that were easier for beginners like me and found Wix. I made a simple webpage and liked how easy it was. After working on it for a few days I also decided to use my domain once more. And so it began...
I used that same bird logo since I did not have anything else, but I knew I wanted to change it as soon as I can. Luckily I was in the right course for that. After learning about logo design and building a brand I wanted to figure out how to create my own one. After doing research on some other graphic designers and their webpages (which by the way are amazing) I decided to go with a more simple style and make my photos the center of attention. I had to change my first website layout completely and at first I decided to go only with two colors - white and dark grey, but I was inspired by one for the pictures on my mood board and decided to add coral as accent color.
I deleted all the clutter like buttons, pages, names and so on. I wanted to have only the essentials and I also made all of my different tabs (home, gallery, blog and about me) on only one page, but in different sections with a scroll effect. The photo galleries are still on their own pages, but that's because I think it will be too much stuff if I add them to the main page.
About the new logo, I've been doing logo sketch ideas for a long time, but it was hard and I could not come up with a very unique concept that I liked. I knew I wanted to have a distinct icon in addition to my name. After doodling for a few days I got one icon concept that stood out for me and I decided to go with it.
At first I was thinking to try to include a camera icon or make a connection with nature, since I mostly have nature photos, but none of these ideas came out good. Soon after I decided to try something else and work with only my initials instead, I came up with the concept I liked rather quick. I thought it was so easy to write down therefore remember (that's why I have it repeated so many times) it was almost like a signature and not only a logo. I tried adding different placements and additional lines, but it was becoming too complicated and hard to read, so I kept it simple. The round form of the logo also adds sense of security and reliability. I was really excited to bring it to my screen and make it even better. First I tried tracing the lines down in Adobe illustrator, but handmade was really uneven and did not match my brand style well. I needed it to be simple shape and symmetrical as possible, so I made a simple circle and cut a small part of it down left to make it look like a capital "D" and then added the line that would be a capital "I" to it.
As you might notice the lines were a bit out of place and not completely even. So after I got the task for this logo I decided to try and remake it, and make it even more symmetrical. I also sampled a small section of my website to make sure I'm working with the same colors.
I used simple lines as guide lines to make sure the spacing was even. I also tried making the "tail" of the "D" even, but it did not look good. I had to make the "I" line stick out a bit on top so it's easier to see that it's two elements and not only one. I saved this concept in all possible colors combinations and formats.
I also wanted to find a matching typeface for my name and the tagline. I tried making one of my handwritten sketches and it turned out ok, but once again It did not match my brand style very well.
I knew I had to work with existing typefaces to make my logo elegant and simple. Since the icon is very bold and even, I went with similar typeface that would add more sense of trustworthiness, seriousness and professionalism for the name and a bit lighter more artistic and elegant one for the tagline.
I tried different fonts and different combinations between them. You can see which ones I picked on my brand style guide here:
I matched the name and the tagline to have the same length by adjusting the size and kerning and then tried to find a way to add the icon to the name. I tried having the icon on top, but it did not look so well and I remembered an advice from a logo lesson video that a long name logo looks best with the icon in front of it. I then made the brand style guide and some logo mockups to add to it. I will most likely use my logo only the website, but it was fun to see how it looks on an office wall, stamp and card.
Overall I'm very happy with the result, I managed to find a somewhat unique color palette and make a distinct icon and name for my brand. The icon is simple, scale-able and easy to remember. The name is bold and elegant at the same time and I think that it matches well with the icon. (I hope the teachers agree with me) :)
Fun story: The name "Deilie" came from a registration I did once. It tried to shorten my long name and it randomly came up with "De(sislava) + Ilie(va) and I thought it was funny. I liked how it included both of my names in one simple word, so I decided to use it for my domain name, and that's how DeiliePhotography was born. It's also very close in pronunciation to the Norwegian word "deilig" which means "delicious", but sadly it has nothing to do with food. :D
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