My Personal Branding Style Sheet and Illustrator
Designing my logo for my brand was fun, but Illustrator did scare me at first.
Project Date: Summer 2023
The goal of the personal branding project was to create a personal brand style sheet using Illustrator and the branding rules we learned in lectures to create a guide that fits our professional persona best. We used Illustrator to create our logos and our choice of Canva or Adobe Express to create the actual style sheet. I chose Canva for my personal style sheet.
A personal style sheet is useful, as it offers a jumping-off point for beginning to create a professional brand. Exploring color meanings and what vibes different fonts give off helps to develop the tone of the brand. It also is a great exercise in exploring how one wants to present themselves professionally to the world. I wanted to show that I’m a warm, hardworking, and trustworthy individual who has a growth mindset. Hence, my choices of different shades of green and brown for brand colors and including a sprouting plant inside my actual combination logo.
The overall process of creating my style sheet was entertaining and a nice brain break for me. Professor Moss provided a slide show that had questions and prompts we could answer as we planned out our stylesheet. Answering those prompts helped guide how exactly I wanted my brand to look and what I wanted to represent.
I enjoyed finding what colors I felt represented me and my brand. It was very relaxing to research color meanings and font meanings as well as find my style. I know my strengths are in having attention to detail and being dependable, which is why I felt drawn to nature colors. Not only is nature calming, but it is also determined and will always find a to grow in almost any environment.
However, when it came to Illustrator, that piece of mind went away. While I had watched all the lectures about Illustrator, completed the certification, and did the practice exercises, Illustrator was still daunting to me. In theory, I knew I would get better in practice, but I felt really unsatisfied with my initial logos, especially my letter marks. I had planned a scrawling script font balanced with a slab serif or geometric sans serif font to balance it out. That was my hope, but in the end, I could not find a script font I liked, so, therefore, my vision for the logo had to change.
While the vision didn’t change much, it still was not what I initially wanted. I eventually created a logo I was happy with, but not without trial and error. My first trial was that I decided to sketch the plant for my logo in Procreate and then exported it into Illustrator. This would have been fine, except the brush stroke I used in Procreate was probably not best suited for the masking that need to happen in Illustrator. I ended up spending an extended amount of time getting rid of white spots in the image so that it would have clean lines.
After that, I came to my next trial of finding the right font, as well as trying to recreate the plant in Illustrator. While I was fairly successful with finding a font that worked for me, I definitely need more practice with drawing shapes and creating lines in Illustrator because the leaf I created was not where I wanted it to be. Also, when it came to finding the right fonts that worked well together, there was trial and error when creating my lettermark. I used my lettermark as a test subject before I would transition a font over to my wordmark. I tried using a script font for the “M” in my lettermark and the “N” and “R” in a different version of the lettermark, and while it looked good up close, I was not satisfied with how it looked from far away.
In the end, I’m happy with the end product I created. It had all the aspects I wanted: trustworthiness, dependability, and quiet elegance. I also feel that my stylesheet shows off my personal personality as well as my professional personality. It’s a wonderful balance that I feel encompasses who I am as a person at this point in my life. In the future, I can see myself improving my logos as I gain more skills and gain more confidence in my Illustrator skills. This is just the beginning of my career, and who knows how I may evolve as I grow professionally. I look forward to looking back and answering all the personal branding questions again every few years so I can continue to have a personal brand that changes and evolves as I do.
