Haitong’s Personal Branding Design
In this project, I will do a follow-up on the previous logo project, which is a personal branding design. The three branding products I’ve decided to focus on are visual branding kit, business card and greeting card design.
Visual Research
Generally speaking, what I look forward to creating in this project is to maintain the previous brief for my logo: minimal, complex, muted and organic. The pictures shown above are some of the inspirations I like, and you can access all my pins for this project here.
Visual Branding Kit
Primary Logo
The primary logo is basically the same as the final product on my previous logo design project. The only difference is that I made some small modifications to the curves to make the entire shape smoother.
Fonts and Basic Color Palette
For fonts, I want to choose one that’s very simple and clean, and another one that is more classic and delicate. I ended up choosing Open Sans Light (first row) and Cardo (second row). I really like the different vibes they are giving, and I also feel like they will make an interesting combination when put together.
The basic color palette contains 6 muted colors of my choice. I mainly want three colors: green, blue, pink because these colors can handle most situations, and more importantly, because these colors correspond to the three characters in my name. Apart from these, I also add in a greyish white, muted gold and silver to make the palette more versatile.
Alternative Logos
The main ideas of the alternative logos are very straightforward: a web icon and a wordmark. The major motivation for me to make a web icon is that my logo is very hard to see when in smaller sizes. So I just took “h“ out, followed the original design to make an alternative version. I also played around with the basic color palette a little bit below. As for wordmark, I think it would be useful to not always have a geometric shape. And since the wordmark is my own signature, it will also be very unique.
Business Card
Winter Sky Blue Version
Oil Green Version
For business cards, I also use a very minimal design. Even though initially I tried to use different colors on the front side, I was not satisfied with how it turned out because the divider of colors does not fit well with my logo. As a result, I move to this current design. I select two of the major colors from my basic palette: winter sky blue and oil green to do two slightly different versions. In addition, the logo on the front side is supposed to be of metallic colors, but due to the time limitation, I didn’t figure out a way to do it nicely.
Greeting Cards
General Purposes
Christmas
Chinese New Year
As is shown above, in this series of greeting card designs, I have three themes to focus on: general purposes (aka “Best Wishes”), Christmas and the Chinese New Year. I choose these because they are personally the most frequently used greeting cards for me; I really want to play around with these concepts and design something that’s useful.
It is pretty obvious that I didn’t put my logo on the front page of all these greeting cards. I did this because I think designing these greetings cards are different from things like business cards, and so putting a big logo might look a bit over-branding. As a result, I only take some simple elements from my visual branding kit: the fonts, the circle from my logo, the colors from my basic palette and I adjusted them for different themes. For the “Best Wishes“ card, I used my original color palette. For the “Merry Christmas“ card, I changed the blue color to dark red, and I changed the green color to dusty pink for the “Happy Chinese New Year“ card. Apart from the dark red, all the colors used are in my original basic palette.
Inside the Card
For the design inside the greeting cards, I only put a small logo on the top as a letterhead. In that case, people will still subtly recognize that this is my design and it won’t be too much. However, just like what I’ve mentioned in the section above, the logo (as well as some parts of the front page) is supposed to be metallic but I haven’t found a way to make it into the effect that I want.
One other thing I wanted to do for this project is to come up with a slogan that describes my professional interest, yet I haven’t come up with a satisfying line. I will keep working on that, as well as other minor issues mentioned above.
