Brand Me: Visual Identity

In order to create a visual identity for myself, I need to create a logo that represents me as a person and reflects my practice. Logo design is something that I struggle with greatly, so this was a very difficult task for me and probably caused a lot more frustration than it should have done. I spent a very long time trying to figure out whether I wanted a picture within my logo, or if I was just going to have it as my name.

To begin with, I toyed around with the idea of having a symbol that related to storytelling and the heroes journey, as narrative driven animation is what I enjoy doing the most. I also thought that it would be a nice little conversation starter, as it would be something that only I knew the meaning of. However, I was also aware that this may cause confusion amongst people and decided against it in the end. This meant that I was back to square one and I had no idea where to go from here. So I went basic, I started with my name and it suddenly dawned on me that my initials spell out ELM. I double checked to see if ELM Animation wasn't already taken and it didn't appear to be so I decided that this would be a nice identity for me, as it was simple and clear. Not only this, but the logo would be simple to animate as an ident, as it is just letters.

Idea gen

Idea Sketches

After sketching out some ideas, I found that preferred the lettering inside the box with 'animation' written smaller underneath, all that was left was to figure out what font I wanted to use and what colour scheme to go with. I wanted the font to be clean, but also reflect my work, however, I found that after looking at a few, I preferred the cleaner fonts and felt that they looked more professional and they were overall nicer to look at.

Fonts

With the fonts chosen, I began to think about colour and decided that I would go for a shade of blue, as it is my favourite colour, I didn't really put much other thought into it. However, I had noticed that a lot of my peers were choosing blue for their colour schemes, so I decided to go for a darker shade, as I hand't seen this being used as much. 

Final Logo

Overall, I'm really pleased with the overall outcome and I feel that I have done a good job considering that design isn't one of my strongest suites. During the task, I learnt that simple is often much better than complex and when designing an identity for yourself it is important to create something that has the ability for various applications.