Advice to my Art School Self: Identity Rebrand
For the first post for Letter Society’s Characters by Letter Society, this month’s challenge was to give advice to our previous art school selves.
As a bit of a background, Letter Society started two years ago by a bunch of creatives composed primarily of SCAD alumni, and every month we task our members to do a challenge that we normally wouldn’t do on our own.
This included challenges like redesigning US currency, the Google homepage, city flags or even just stamps.
This prompt was a great excuse to go and do something that us designers all dread revisiting, our existing identity system.
My current logo was one that I went and did for my final class at SCAD: Advertising Self-Promotion. The class was three months long, and the logo itself is about four years old.
The original inspiration for my logo came from three main sources. One, I was really into the buttons and patches. I just enjoyed how many were out there, the constrained space that you had to work in and how every patch and button looked so unique from the rest. I was a big fan of space ones, specifically the ones they would make for every launch.
My second form on inspiration came from overprinting and the colors that would come out of that. Specifically, at the time I loved the color palette for Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. The interior pages used these limited colors to a wonderful effect, and I loved that despite how loud the clashing the colors were, that everything worked.
My final form of inspiration came from spirographs. As a kid, I loved making these things, and enjoyed the process of taking random swirls and turning them into something really cool. The concepts that go into making these, iterating, learning the tools and translating what I wanted in my mind onto the page. Turns out this workflow made it much easier for me to transition into working in design programs, since I got the process down pat early on.
So, if you combine these concepts and put them into a logo, you get this thing. At the time I was very happy with it, and college me was ecstatic that I went and had a sense of identity and branding that I could get behind.
But, years later looking back at it I can see that there’s some opportunities for improvement. Specifically in these areas:
- Complexity — This damn thing is throwing a lot at you at once. You’ve got the Death Star, the text wrapping around, the geometric pattern behind it, the ribbon. It’s a lot to take it, and as I went more into production I had to resort to making a smaller version that would work on business cards.
- Timelessness — I contribute this more towards me being burned out and lazy once I got past the concepting phase, but there are some very clear elements in my design that looked pretty cool in 2012, but don’t really work for 2016. No one uses ribbons anymore, the text wrapping around the logo doesn’t work now that most work is viewed on mobile devices as opposed to computer screens and print materials. At that small a viewport, my spirograph pattern in the background looks more like a mistake than intricate linework
- Ownership — While my logo did indeed look wacky and different from my fellow students, in hindsight outside of the colors, there wasn’t a lot about this logo which could be attributed to me. The elements of it were very much trend hunting, and everything about it seemed rushed. Yes, I concepted exactly what I wanted to do and delivered on it, but there really should’ve been more iterations to get it to be something I could’ve called my own.
So after one month of going and revisiting my work during my free time, I came up with something that feels more aligned with what I originally wanted in 2012.
It’s a much simpler logo, and while still has the loud color palette, has a bit more restraint to it. The complex spirograph elements are still in there, but they’re more subtle. In detail you can see them, but even as a small size the effect is still there.
From a technical level, I have improved a lot since college. Back when I made this in college, I barely understood what the Pathfinder tool was in Illustrator, and as such the working file was a pure mess. Nothing was grouped together, there were a lot of unnecessary paths and the colors were not web/print friendly. This time, I actually learned how to do proper overprinting, which attributed towards the slight purple done in the middle of the second sphere. College me would’ve faked it and called it a night. Present day me understands process better.
I was happy to say that outside of revamping the logo, everything else was more refinements instead of drastic changes. My existing color palette was still solid, so I kept that. For my typography, I went and took my existing font, Memphis, and used the heavier weight as a display font, with Avenir as my go-to for my any sort of body text.
From here, I went and did a revamp of my existing assets, and started building a library of spirographs that I would to add to my self-promotion work and start building my brand.
When you combine all this stuff, I started to have a better sense of my identity, and it made me happy to look back on my previous branding and seeing that in my years since college, I really have learned a lot more and have been constantly pushing myself to improve.
So, do I have any final advice to my college self?
Well, I wish I was a bit more humble back then. If I just went and admitted to my friends and peers that I needed a hand with Illustrator, my logo probably would’ve been done better from a technical standpoint. As creatives, I understand that we usually need to guarded and not admit weakness since every creative is technically a competitor, but as I’ve grown older I am now more accepting that there’s sometimes (or a lot of times) there will be something I don’t know, and it’s always better to ask someone who knows more than you.
I also wish that I didn’t treat design as a metric, instead of it being my passion. Your personal brand is extremely important, and is the main thing that people need to connect with to understand you outside of your portfolio. My old logo had so much room to improve, but back then I was just burned out and when I reached a certain threshold, I just said “fuck it”, because in my mind, this was only supposed to be a grade.
In reality, design is something that is constantly revolving around my life, and when I treated my work as an assignment, it took the fun out of it. Nowadays, alongside my job, I love doing Letter Society stuff, because it constantly pushes me to do new things and challenge myself. On my personal site, most of my work shown was all done in my free time for LSo. And this was only within the last two years. Imagine what would’ve happened if I kept that fire post college and kept learning and innovating.
But, that’s what learning and maturing is I suppose. The truth is, if I went and actually showed this post to myself in 2012, I’d probably dismiss it, because I was a cocky shit back then. I thought that everything I did was right (and would constantly try to validate and justify it), never listened to constructive feedback because I thought it was a personal attack, and was not flexible in terms of my work.
So I think the only real advice I would give myself back is just to keep doing what you love, and understand that there will be up’s and down’s. Eventually though, you’ll figure it out and will be doing some kick ass things.
