Being in the third and final year of my degree, it is imperative that I create a strong personal branding which represents not only me and my practice in order which I can use to represent myself as a professional in the industry for the foreseeable future.
Throughout my three years on the course the advice we have been given on the PPP module when it comes to networking and contacting was professionals has been to separate yourself out from the other graphic design students by adding a personal touch, which is why I devised a brief over the summer to design and craft a interactive mail shot which I could send out to studios as part of my personal branding.
I began by listing my interests, not only professionally but personally which I could possibly use in the mailshot to give a personalised feel and could inform the design decisions I make throughout the course of the brief.
The execution of personal branding/namesyles I have produced for the previous two PPP module's have not been strong or particularly effective in representing me, therefore in for my final I would like to produce something I could theoretically use for the foreseeable future.
I began by choosing fonts which had a hand-rendered in order to reflect my preference for hand-rendered and traditional production techniques which I feel forms the basis of my practice, however I think the two fonts I have tried here don't have much impact and appear quite amateurish. The 'free-hand' stroke doesn't give off the professional feel which I would like to communicate with my personal branding.
I also think the thin stroke isn't impactful enough as a visual identity which would theoretically be applied to a range of collateral.
This font, 'Lemon Sun' still has the hand-rendered feel in reference to my personal design practice and yet has a more professional feel to it than the first two fonts I tried. I like the negative space achieved when the name style bleeds off the edge of the business card as it is quite impactful which is a necessity for a business card.
The individual characters themselves are quite unique and could possibly work as individual icons.
Similarly to the first two fonts I tried, this typeface again seems quite amateurish and not appropriate for my personal branding.
I chose to use yellow as the main colour for my personal branding as not only is it quite impactful but it is my favourite colour and therefore adds a bit of personality to my outcome which is something I would like to achieve with my final outcome(s).
By duplicating the the name style it created this 'drop shadow' effect which I believe works quite well in creating a stark contrast against the yellow.
Email address lining up with the crossbar of the 'A' is visually pleasing.
In order to ensure the legibility of the information I choose to use a grey hue for my contact information. I played around with a couple of placements for the information as when the type overlaid both the yellow and the black it was quite hard to read.
I've decided to use Futura for any body copy etc. in the printed collateral I will produce for my personal branding. The sans-serif aesthetic is friendly in-keeping with the tone of voice I want to portray.
The type was easiest to read when only overlaying the yellow as seen in the first design I tried.
Final Business Card
I am really pleased with the final outcome for my business card, this is the one piece of collateral which would be handed out to studios, professionals and possible contacts in the industry when networking and therefore needed to be quite impactful whilst displaying my unique personality which separates me from other designers.
The full bleed for the name style, immediately catches the eye especially with the yellow I have chose and would ideally be something that would catch the receivers attention. For the back of the business card I chose to add "it would be top notch to hear from you!" which not only represents my sense of humour as a friendly individual but adds a personal and informal touch to my business card.
Representing myself as a 'friendly designer' is something I believe would strengthen my visual brand and something which will gain the attention of professionals.
The spots are something I think which work well with the name style and will be a constant throughout my printed collateral to tie together the different aspects of my brand.
I believe this is the strongest visual identity I have created so far over the course of three years and something I could realistically see myself using in the future.
My statement of intent which I devised at the beginning of the year to sum up my practice was "I am a concept-driven Graphic Designer with a particular emphasis on the exploration of hand-rendered and mixed medias to achieve interactive outcomes." Therefore I felt it was appropriate that the mailshot I sent out to studios reflected this.
Particularly over the past two years of the course I have liked the idea of creating outcomes which the user could really interact with and this is something I have strived to achieve with briefs such as YCN: Bear, Hoax and Save the Children etc.
Bearing this in mind I came up wight the idea that the mailshot could also double up as something else, allowing the receiver to directly interact with it.
One of the concepts I came up with was the paper fortune tellers I used to make as a child where the one person allows the other to pick a colour, number etc to reveal a fortune.
I began my mocking up a smaller fortune teller to refresh my memory on how they were actually made and to give myself a better idea of what dimensions would work best for the final so that it could still be held in the hand but when flat would not be too large or too small to send by post.
Through trial and error I discovered that 50 cm x 50 cm was the perfect size.
Mailshot
Producing a mock-up to scale then gave me a better idea of how I could distribute the all the information I wanted to include.
When the fortune teller is flat it is the average size of a letter, and therefore by placing an address and stamp on the front effectively doubles up as a mailshot.
Fortune teller
In order to portray a sense of tongue and cheek humour to the design which again is reflective of my design practice I like the idea of using insider Graphic Design jokes which the receiver would relate to and would therefore find more engaging.
Final List of 'fortunes':
I felt the centre of the fortune teller would be the perfect place to my contact information or even possibly my business card to enable the studio to contact me hold they wish too.
I experimented with a couple of different ways to incorporate the fortunes into the fortune teller. Originally I tried writing them on the black card with finer liner which would be quite impactful whilst also reference my preference toward hand-rendered medias however it did not give off the professional feel I felt was necessary as this mail shot would actually be sent to working professionals as a representation of my skills as a designer.
In order to continue the theme of interaction I like the idea of cutting out pockets in the fortune teller which would allow the user to takeout the fortunes perhaps to keep or re-arrange allowing longevity to the design.
Fortunes
I applied the previous aesthetic I had chosen for the business card etc. to the pull-out fortunes in order to continue the continuity of my personal branding which should work as a whole. Again I used Futura for the fortunes on the front and similarly to the back of the business card the back is a spotted pattern.
Business card incorporated into the mailshot to allow the studios to contact me
Fortunes can be taken in and out of the pockets to allow interaction with the design
Perfect size to be held in the hand and interacted with
Once I had finished the production of the mail shots I sent them first class to the mailing list of studios I had devised from researching into their work, studio environment and ethics and narrowing down which was best suited to me.
As I had previously emailed the studios with a brief explanation of who I was and what interested me about their work I wanted to use this mailshot as a an opportunity to show what I can actually do and my design interests.
As yet i've yet to receive a response.
