Branding is a really big term and in the real world something that is a much more rigorous and time consuming than the short and fun project you are about to see below. As part of this exploration, I set out to design a playful visual system for my personal brand which consists of a monogram, word mark and visual mark.
Always start with pen and paper is one of the many very important things I learnt during my first year at design school. This is exactly how I will approach my project. To start with my initials are P and M so I will look online for references and resources of designs that inspire me. From there I will make low fidelity sketches of what my personal brand could look like. You can see these in the image below. I seem to really like a simple and abstract style of monogram, similar to that of The Mill Logo, The MIT Media Lab logo and Fore design’s logo.
I chose the sketching style that I liked the most and moved to some digital exploration. Here are the outcomes.
This is my monogram and wordmark mocked up on some business cards. I'm extremely pleased with the result, it has the minimal aesthetic I was going for. One area that can be improved is definitely the clarity of the P. I'm going to continue working on this monogram to improve this aspect of the design.
I am absolutely terrible at drawing. If I were to attempt to draw a sketch of myself it would really go horribly bad. Instead for my avatar I looked for inspiration and references online and tried to best match the character to myself. I think it turned out really well and adding the photoshop pen tool to the tie was a nice touch!
In summary, I am very pleased with how my little personal branding project went. In the process I learnt a ton about branding and the tools required to create a personal brand.