Malorie Aaron | Personal Identity

Malorie Aaron | Personal Identity

Personal Identity: Case Study

This identity project is essentially a 2 week process of designing three polished and refines logos or identities to help brand Malorie Aaron (myself) for what will end up being my professional portfolio website (which includes Web Design projects and other design work).  My goal was to create an identity mark that represents me and the work I do while incorporating a sense of genuineness, calmness along with a little bit of techiness.  Let me show you my process.

The Target Audience

The people who will be looking at my logo will primarily be clients/ employers in the Web and Design world.  I anticipate people seeing my personal identity logo on a resume, cover letter, stationary (maybe), business card and my portfolio website.  I expect that I will be hired by mainly clients because I intend to be more of a freelance designer and developer.

Who Am I?

Data Collection

I did a quick survey via Qualtrics and Facebook to gather some information about what others think of when they think of me.  This data helps me to narrow down and decide what characteristics to target in my personal identity logo.

Here’s what I was told:

Beautiful, talented, honest, warm-hearted, Smile, talented, beautiful, pretty, sweet, Genuinely sweet, Beautiful, Sweet, kind, love, sweet, kind, genuine, hard working, Kind hearte, loving, creative, motivated, and happy, She is a nice girl, fun, Adorable, sunshine, Photography, cute, Beauty, Compassionate, smile, bubbly, kind, Dedicated, trustworthy, sincere, humble, daughter, family, Spunky, kind, happy, Beautiful, humble, integrity, good friend, sweetheart, beautiful, Sweet, caring, loving, compassionate, Wonderful, Big, smile, Cake, Fun, talented, happy, helpful, Sweet, Genuine, beautiful, hopeful, Godly Wife, Talented, My beautiful niece, smile, Happy, bubbly, Nice, Beautiful, beautiful, and talented, Adorable, Gorgeous, Beautiful, female, pretty, friend, beautiful and effective

What I learned about myself

I learned that a lot of people think I’m sweet, kind and beautiful.  I feel like that was a common theme of peoples responses.  I usually don’t consider myself to be sweet, but people perceive me as that.   A lot of these words making me feel really good about who I in other people’s eyes.  I’m not quite sure how to design a personal identity logo that communicates sweetness, kindness and beauty, but I am excited to get going on it and see where I get with it.

Concept Development | Step 1

Develop Inspiration Keywords List

 

I’ve been working on designing a personal identity logo for myself.  Over the last week or so, I have narrowed down what I want to communicate in my logo.  Here’s my inspiration word list:

Genuine/ Sincere

Talented/ Creative

Motivated/ Dedicated/ Progress

Sweet/ Beautiful/ Feminine

Techy/ Web

 

Sketches

This is just one sheet of my original pencil & paper sketches.  Sketching really helps me to visualize my ideas and realize it they are actually good enough to bring into the computer and continue working on.  As you can see, there are a lot of really rough ideas here, but it’s an essential step in my concept development process.

Rethinking What I Communicate

Once I had a solid direction, I thought about how I could communicate my key words into my design.

Here’s a list of ways I could communicate those keywords:

New, does not resemble fade logos/designs, incorporate more than one visual concept into one logo, angles, structure, edgy (literal edges), symbol of upward progression,  neutral yet energetic color scheme, ect.

Color Scheme

The color scheme I ended up choosing for this project is cool, neutral series of colors.  I wanted to go with a cool color scheme to communicate professionalism and more of a corporate feel, but not so harsh and rigid as a pure blue.  The colors I chose are muted and toned down a little bit.  I chose to do this because I didn’t want the colors to be in your face or too loud because I’m not that way.  The first three colors are my neutral colors and the Ocean Canvas and Steel Ripple are more energetic and bright.  I don’t intend to use all of these colors at once, but they all can be incorporated into the branding.

The Challenges

The biggest challenge was trying to communicate techiness and yet a soft feminine feel to this identity mark.  Often times tech logos are very edgy and angular to play off of the coding aspect of that industry.  I wanted to communicate that aspect of the industry, but I also wanted to incorporate who I am as a Web Designer.

The Solution

After many, many sketches, digital sketches, variations and iterations I found a way to incorporate the two aspects of techiness and femininity.  I did this by using a soft, neutral color scheme and thick line widths with other elements such as angles and pointed end points.

Vectorizing & Variations | Step 2

Vectorizing Sketches

I took several of my hand drawn sketches and sketched them out in Illustrator.  Often times getting ideas into Illustrator will tell you if it really is as great of an idea as you though or not.  In my case, a lot of my concepts just didn’t hold up once I vectorized them.  This step was helpful to weed out those ideas that don’t have potential and helped me see new concepts and generate better ideas.

Logo One | Variations

I am currently working on this step of the design process.  I have worked up 4 variations of one of my top three final logos.  My favorite from these variations is this one:

logo_21

Logo Two | Variations

After getting some feedback and thinking about these variations, I decided that they really weren’t what I was going for.  The sharp points and edges were too knife like – which does not communicate progressive, genuine or feminine… so I kept going with this logo.  This is my favorite variation:

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Logo Three | Variations

This logo was a little less exciting as far as variations go because I had done more digital sketches of this one prior to running it through the variations process.  I like how this one feels very structured yet comfortable.  The arrows created by the negative space are a neat element to this logo and could be used through out branding or indicate upward progression.  This was my favorite variation:

 

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Final Touches | Step 3

Final Color Variations

I decided earlier on that I wanted to use the brighter Ocean Canvas Blue and Steel Ripple Grey in my identity marks.  I still really like the other colors in my chosen color scheme, but I feel like the blue and gray communicate a more professional tone in the Web Design industry and that’s what I wanted to communicate about myself.

Adding Typography

I like to save the typography for the very end of my design process.  Personally, I feel like the logo or identity mark itself should be strong enough to stand on its own and not have to use typography as a crutch.  Once I decided on my final three identity marks (which included feedback from others), I went searching for complementary type faces for each of my three identity marks.  I narrowed a long list of different typefaces down into these few options.

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Sketches

Vectorized Sketches

Variations of Top 3

Amazing Logos

Final Personal Identity Logos

The inspiration for this logo comes from implied circles and a crescent moon.  People have told me that the can see the ocean or an eye in this logo, and that’s ok with me because I was going for a more organic, calm feel for this logo.  The implied circles and the movement of the logo imply progression and progress.  I feel like this logo is successful in communicating both beauty in design and advancement in technology.

As far as typography goes, I chose this particular typeface because of the perfect circles in the a, o and e.  The sharpness to the tops of the letters M and A also resemble the points where the circles taper off.

 

This logo is my favorite one.  The use of triangles and negative space to imply and M and A while also communicating an upward progression fits my goal for this project perfectly.  The A creates a strong upward arrow which leads the eye around the triangles of the M and then back again to the A.  This logo incorporates both the genuineness and femininity I wanted to communicate in harmony with the harder, more angular feel of technology.

I chose this typeface for this identity mark because the lat end points of the characters and the slightly softer feel of the letters.  I feel like it provides a nice complimentary contrast to the identity mark itself.

 

This identity mark is definitely interesting and also meets the goals of this project.  It perfectly balances the angular nature of the coding/ technology world and genuine beauty of the design world.  The interlacing M and A indicate this same idea of marrying techiness and beauty as a Web Designer.

I chose this typeface because the roundness of the letters add a nice contrast to the straight structure of the identity mark.  It you look at the M and A, they have a very similar blocky cap like the M and A in the identity mark, this makes it a great companion typeface for this particular identity mark.

 

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