Self Branding

To kick off my self branding project, I began to note some initial ideas down. I recorded the words my friends and peers used to describe me and decided to use these as a focus.

A lot of people said I am down to earth which is something I quite liked. Using this as my main inspiration, I decided to look at potentially using natural earthy tones, and perhaps even some earth imagery.  I thought about using a little bag of soil as my business card - a metaphor for being 'down to earth' etc.

I also thought about including the Yorkshire dialect in my self branding to highlight my proud Yorkshire roots!! Phrases such as 'a reyt gud designer' or 'nowt I can't do' would create a friendly and approachable tone. It would also add an element of humour to my branding which would never go amiss!

I started thinking about brand names, such as 'The Bronte Brand', 'brandBronte' or 'bronteBrand', although I quickly moved away from this as I felt it was too impersonal and corporate.


 


Eventually I decided upon a simple 'Bronte Webster Designs' - whilst this is plain, I felt it was nice and personal and made me seem more approachable as a designer. I wanted my logotype to include just my initials 'BW'. I started with some quick initial sketches of this, playing around with layout and how the two letters could work together.




I converted these sketches into a digital version, and decided upon the capitalized 'BW' with the 'W' in reverse, in order to fit together nicely in an oblique typeface (Futura Heavy Oblique). I picked this typeface as it is my favourite and I use it for everything!




 I chose these earthy tones to work with in order to allude to the idea of my down to earth personality.



I then started to play around with my chosen logotype with these colours. I really like the peach background with orange text, so chose this as my final design.



To go with my friendly and approachable tone, I wanted to include a basic smiley face as my logo. I am a massive fan of the classic yellow and black smiley face, typically seen as a sticker and popular in the 1990s. I chose to use this but in my own brand colours.




My pay off:

'down to earth designer'

My description:

'i’m a reyt good creative thinker from yorkshire and i’m passionate about graphics, grapes and my grandma. i think colour is fab and projects make me v giddy. hit me up if you wanna make some #ART togev !!'

I chose to keep my pay off and description in lower case and with improper English in order to keep a casual, chatty and friendly tone. This also reflects the way I text and my personality so I really liked this informal element.

I placed all my chosen elements together to create two different business cards. The first card is simply my brand name and logo on a standard business card size, a little thing to remind people of who I am and my identity. The other design is a circular shape to fit the smiley face, with my social media and contact details on the back.



I created a few different mock ups to show how my self branding would work in different contexts:





The Presentation:

I was very nervous for the presentation, especially when I arrived on the morning and discovered I was presenting to most of the group rather than the small group of 4 or 5 like I had thought! Getting up was nerve racking and I was sweating like mad but I eventually relaxed into the presentation and felt it went quite well!