My brand

The new Practice of Design project is to develop a brand for ourselves. The process of developing a brand for someone who is not exactly sure what his chosen field of expertise will be has proven to be rather challenging. However, being a student of design, I began at the beginning. That is, I treated the task as though I was developing an identity for a client.

First, I defined the problem: Using my current interests in web design and illustration, I decided to call myself just that, a web designer/illustrator/graphic designer. My plan is to try not to associate myself with any currently existing design firm as I hope to become a freelance designer. With that, I did a little research on the internet as to how other illustrator/web designers have branded themselves. I quickly noticed that many of my future colleagues out there (who shall remain nameless) have logos that I consider to be rather busy, with too much going on, or appearing too 'clip-arty'. Others have logos that appear to have been created by professional designers who have been creating logos for many years. These logos are simple, to the point and elegant. So I decided to try to go that route.

Next, I doodled. My doodling resulted in many pages of really bad attempts to make my name look cool or 'logo-y'. I quickly realized that I could either go the corporate route or more of a typography-based route. My corporate idea was deemed too generic and "inside the box". 

After that I decided to change gears completely and start over with a blank canvas. That's when I came up with my current design, which consists of three lines and resembles a wave (sort of) but is actually an 'R' and a 'C', my initials. I think it's simple and elegant and exactly what I'm going for. My only criticism is that it's not obviously the logo of a graphic designer/illustrator/web designer. It is, however, the best logo consisting of an 'R' and a 'C' that I have personally come across, so I'm sticking with it. 

The coordinating letterhead consists of only the RC/wave logo centered at the top of the page.