Branding business
While Tumblr went down for maintenance, I’ve been busy working on the finishing touches to my new logo.
For quite some time now, I’ve been meaning to officially open up a design business. In the past year, I had a chance to do several design works for individuals & companies, and branding has become a real need.
Read the full story after the jump
“Do you have a business card?”
When someone ask you for a business card and you never actually made one for yourself, that a big no-no. Sure, in the age of the smartphones, the need for those little paper rectangles has become obscured, but nevertheless it’s still a part of our current life.
When I first started this blog, and opened my portfolio website and Facebook page, I was in need for a logo.
I had a good advice awhile back, saying that any logo is better than no logo at all.
I selected one of my favorite sketches from my Vehicle design course, and started to build my foundations around it.
Since it was time to really start thinking of branding my upcoming business, I started to sketch and play around with ideas for my brand.
I knew I wanted my name to be a part of my logo and title. I’m a designer, and I wanted people to be familiar with my works, and be able to relate them with my name.
I also knew that as a designer, I appreciate minimalism and simplicity, and this is how I strive to design.
From sketch to finish
My earlier sketches revolved around my initials - BZ.
At first I attempted to do an Ambigram, but that didn’t look too good.
Then I tried to combine the letters B and Z, and the rest of my sketches centered around that idea.
After I had several ideas that I liked, I scanned the page and opened up Adobe Illustrator.
Illustrator is really a great sketching tool. As opposed to Photoshop, in illustrator, you are not limited to a canvas, neither do you actually paint with pixels.
You “paint” with vectors, points and lines that connect between them. And it’s really easy to duplicate a sketch and quickly create many variations of it.
After experimenting with simple geometric shapes such as triangles and squares, I arrived to one my favorite shapes – the hexagon.
The reason that the hexagon is one of my favorite shapes, is that it is a shapes that occurs in nature.
You can see it in beehives, and you can see it in molecules. It’s a building block.
Also, the shape of the hexagon can be divided into smaller triangles and thus create a parallelogram, which ultimately became the choice for my logo.
In the final stages of designing my logo, It came down to four options. All the shapes where extracts of the hexagon, and I started to play around with shading and coloring.
I liked the idea of a 2D shape that looked three dimensional, and for me these shapes also had a mathematical logic and an essence of Origami.
The logo I ended up choosing is made of two parallelograms bounded within a hexagon. For me, The combination of these shapes and color, produces a sense that the shapes are floating in the air.
when you look at the logo, you start to feel as if the symbol is in 3D, and that is exactly the feeling that I was looking for.
But most importantly, I managed to include my initials in the logo (even if by a very faint sense).
The final part that was missing, was my name. Since I was going with a minimalistic approach, I was looking for the right fonts for the job.
It was important for me to find commercially free fonts, so I browsed the great site DAFONT.com, from which I got the fonts Lane and Florencesans.
I preferred to use DESIGN in the title, rather than DESIGNER, because design is what I do, and that what my business is about.
But still something was amiss.
With all the sharp edges and geometric shapes, there was a lack of personality and warmth to the whole image.
at that point I had an idea, and so I signed my name on a piece of paper, scanned it and traced it in Illustrator with the pen tool. Now things where looking much better.
Final notes
Throughout the process, I consulted with my friends and family. Between every step, I took the time to comprehend and contemplate on the design.
The whole process actually took me about two week, just to check and double check myself, and review other opinions, until the concept started to mature right before my eyes.
and this is of course true to design in general.
So this is a new beginning for me. Now I can finally start working on my business card :)
Also while Tumblr was down, I took the time to update my Facebook page with new cover and profile pictures, using my new logo.
I also added more of my projects to the page.
So be sure to check it out, and if you like my stuff, please click the like button on my page, and feel free to share my work around.
Boaz
