Self Branding - Logo Design

Personal Logo Design //

As part of studio brief 02, I have decided to look into designing a personal logo that I could use to promote myself both as a designer and person in general. 

To begin designing a logo, I first had to decide what I wanted to communicate about myself and my design practice.

I've narrowed it down to 3 aspects; Aspiring Graphic Designer, Skier and Drafter 


Graphic Designer

I have only recently entered the world of Graphic Design and am therefor still finding my feet in the discipline. I am unsure as to what area of design interests me most and so I aim to explore as many possible avenues to get a good feel of the spectrum of work within design.

However, up until now, my main interests have been in publication design and typography. because of this I have started off my logo design process using type only...

As my initials read 'BB', I thought that this might be a good place to start. I have selected a few typefaces that I like and that I think would work well as the primary stage in my logo development. Helvetica is my favourite typeface of them all, it's clean and simple and reads well both in body text and headings. 

I have experimented with reflecting the letter B onto itself which has created an interesting shape that I will bring forward.

As I have included drafting as one of my prominent skills and interests, I have further experimenting by hand using hand-rendered type. 

The next step was to make the letters come together and look more like a logo. To do this, I've experimented with frames and negative space. The reason for choosing a triangular frame for some of the experiments is because I want to start introducing one of the other aspects I wish to communicate through the logo; Skiing. 

Skiing and just generally being in the mountains has always been a huge passion of mine and has played a huge roll up until now. This is why I will include it in my self promoting as it is a big part of me as a person. I also try and combine this passion of mine with studio briefs as much as I can.

I have then played around further and produced the logos above. They are very much more geometric than the first. I've taken the negative space from the BB and skewed and rotated them. 

One idea that came to me after I produced these is to use these four squares as frames. For example, the four frames could be filled with images of myself as a person or designer to promote my skills and interests within my logo design...

Following on from the logo development, I noticed that when I tilted the two BBs on their side, a shape similar to a mountain range formed. This game me the idea to take this further and see how I could develop it.

I've tilted the four negative spaces 45 degrees to the right which has created an image of 4 squares sitting on one corner. I then noticed from this that it looks like a mountain range reflected onto water; I added a thin line to show this. I then removed the square on the far right as I thought that the logo was too wide. I also thought that even with removing a square, it was still obviously two capital Bs meeting in the middle.

I took some inspiration from the logos I found above. I looked into logos that use mountains as well as ones that use a similarly simplistic style to my experiments. The top right logo is my favourite out of the lot and is the one that influenced my development the most. 

I worked on the logo a bit more and came up with some new and interesting shapes, however I think that I am happy with where the logo is at and have decided to keep the tilted BB shape.

One criticism of the logo from my peers is that it is not obviously my initials at first glance and only becomes obvious when it is explained. This is a major set back as the BB element is the one that is the most important. At the moment, the logo looks more like a mountaineering or ski company as apposed to a personal logo. I started experimenting with different shaped b's to see if I could come up with a similar logo but that is more obviously my initials.

Above I have illustrated my development from the initial BB idea through to the mountains logo. I've then added a colour which suits the skiing and mountain aspects of the logo design and is also a colour that I like to use in other work. 

Above is the idea of filling each square with an interest or skill of mine. This could be translated over a number of different projects, uses, briefs etc.