Growing up, I have always been told that I was a good illustrator and designer (as much as anyone can in a small town in northwest Ohio). So that is my base for all of my design ideas! I always go for sketching and then re-sketching to get a good idea of what I want to convert to a digital version.
For my personal brand, I took a few days and I thought about the few things that I wanted to keep from my previous brand and what I wanted to change.
There were some obvious things that I wanted to change, like my name and the overall feel of my design. In college, when I first made this design, I thought I truly knew what my design style was. I thought it was more traditional and minimal and straightforward. After a few years in the field though, I found out that I liked to challenge myself. I wanted to make my mark, look at trends, and make my design better than the last one that I did. I worked with colors a lot more and tried to make a balance between minimalist and modern. So I wanted to make sure that it was conveyed through my new logo.
Something that I wanted to keep was my little flower in my logo. It might seem more arbitrary to other designers, but it has a significance to me and who I am. When I was young, I was adopted from China with no information about who my parents are. The only thing that I had was my birth name, which roughly means Pretty Mayflower. The Mayflower in my logo is a representation of me and my story so it was important for me to keep that in my logo.
Some of the sketches that I started with you can view below:
As you can see, lots of different ideas, lots of different things that didn't particularly match what I initially wanted. The best advice that I got from another designer is that I should put every idea I have on paper. If you are anything like me (a typical type A personality), when you get an idea in your head and you think it's good, it's stuck there until you go through with it. I found out that it is better to write it down and then see how it fails or that it works then get yourself stuck because you keep thinking about that one idea. So initially I started with this design:
It was modern, minimalist, and it had my flower, but after trying to digitalize it many times, I realized that my sketch looked much better in my mind. So I felt stuck for a little bit and took a day to work on a different project.
I looked back at my sketches and saw this:
It was minimalist, modern, but it did not have my flower. So I looked and tried to find a way to fit it in. and then I noticed something great. That small overlap in the O's created a perfect middle petal for the same flower that I had in my current logo.
(see below)
So I was all in on the design now! I made some modifications to the flower to make it more modern and after a few hours of messing around I came up with this:
I was happy about the design but there were things that I still wanted to add. COLOR. I deterred from using color when I first designed my brand because of the cost and how I believed that my process was very black and white. This time around I wanted to add some color to the design so I had a few color pallets made with cooolers.com.
None of these are from any particular decision as to how they represent me, but more about what color choices that I liked together. In the end, I ended up not having luck with any of the combinations that I chose so I went around and chose some colors from each pallet.
And ended up with the final result:
I'm excited to reveal this process and my new branding logo to you. I hope that I will be able to share more of these experiences with you as time goes on.