The Problem
In applying for grad school and jobs, I realized that my visual identity had become disjointed over the years. My portfolio website and resumes had styles which didn’t match each other, let alone my personal style.
Because I enjoy learning about branding and visual identity, I wanted to take on myself as a professional client.
My Role
I was the sole visual designer on the project.
Timeframe
2020: 3 months
I started by brainstorming brand adjectives creating a moodboard with visual elements I felt reflected those adjectives. I wanted my visual identity on paper to feel like an extension of my presence in real life. For this reason, I chose to go for a maximalist style because that is in keeping with the way that I dress, decorate my room, and approach life.
I started by pulling colors from my bed spread because these are colors I find myself gravitating towards over and over again. I chose shades and tones that reflected the era and wanted to incorporate cool and warm tones. I went with a warmer green and cool blue for accent colors, but ended up only using the green sparingly.
I knew I wanted to go with a 1970’s style swashy font & illustration style. I really love the blotty ink drawings and saturated colors of this era. I included Payday in my moodboard because it was a game I played often when I would visit my grandmother and I thought the fonts and illustration style were really indicative of what I was trying to achieve.
4. The first round I didn’t get things quite right. I went with a font that had beautiful curling swashes but was a bit too ornamental to be used for resumes and portfolio websites. I also was using a geometric serif font for paragraphs which wasn’t really coordinating with the script font as much as I envisioned.
5. I ended up going with Bookman because it also had elegant swashes and ampersands that were to die for. Additionally, I could pair it with Bookmania (based on Bookman) for smaller paragraph text because of its lighter weight. On this website, bookman is used for all the headers and Bookmania is used for the paragraph fonts.
6. The colors were also not quite right at the start either. I had initially tried to go for bold colors on a white background and realized the contrast was just too much combined with the visual details of my portfolio projects. It started to look like a children’s circus. Fortunately my friend sent me some visual inspiration which lead me to look at other media from the time and I realize that these bold colors were rarely presented on stark white backgrounds. I just needed to soften the background color so I could keep the bold colors I had fallen in love with.
While I still wish to work on the illustration style, I am overall pleased with the illustrative icons I created for the website. I traced stock photos in Adobe Fresco and found brushes that seemed to give me the variable line width and washy color I wanted. I kept them to the three main tones of the website, but initially when everyone had yellow skin I felt like this made it feel too much like the Simpsons. I ended up going with more natural skin tones. I was pleased with the outcome because it also allowed me to represent a diversity of skin tones.
Key Takeaways
I really enjoyed working on rebranding my professional documents because now when I hand someone my CV or a link to my portfolio they both feel like they belong to the same universe and that universe is mine.
In the future, I hope to work on honing my illustrative skills so that the illustrations on my website more match the era. I hope to incorporate elements like patterns in clothing and those wide wiggly hands that were so iconic in 60/70’s illustration.
I also hope to do some more exploration into the use of color, pattern, and shape to further refine my brand and push it further into the aesthetic I set out to achieve.