Maggie Theall Personal Branding
The Project
The objective of this project was to create a personal brand system for myself as a designer to ensure that I have a cohesive brand and brand materials as I enter the professional design world. I aimed to create a system that was unique, professional, and representative of who I am and the type of work that I do.
The Design Process
Step 1: Research
Initial research began with me looking into how other companies position themselves and how other designers create brand systems. Ultimately, this is what I took away from my research:
Personal brand systems need to be unique to the individual using them.
Personal brand systems should give me an idea of the person behind them.
Personal brand systems need to be adaptable to be used in many different kinds of media.
Personal branding should remain consistent.
All pieces of the design system should work together.
Step 2: Logo Design
Logo design began with a ton of different logo variations. Ultimately, I decided that using the tea cup motif would be the most successful. It represents me as a person as everyone who knows me knows that I have a love for tea and it would be fun to play with as an icon.
This brought me back to the drawing board to create unique tea cup sketches:
Until the final design came to life!
Step 3: Brand Board Creation
Step 4: Business System
I began my business system with business card designs. These were my initial designs:
I felt that the card with an illustration on the back was fun and more representative of who I am as a person, so I went with that for my final card design:
This illustration was then incorporated into the rest of my branding. It was difficult to fit the entire illustration into all elements, so frequently I opted to just use the honey stick and hand coming in from the sides. I felt this was a nice way to keep my designs looking professional without abandoning who I am.
Step 4: Bringing it all together
Setting up all my branding together is the most satisfying part of this design process. Seeing my branding stand on its own and look cohesive made me immensely proud of all the work that went into this brand development.
Learnings:
The biggest takeaway from this project is the amount of time that goes into creating a brand.
I spent a ton of time on sketches and critique to ensure that everything was cohesive.
Creating the logo alone took significantly more time that I imagined it would.
There was a lot of trial and error with business documents.
A lot more documentation goes into branding than I realized.
Prior to this project, I never considered creating a letterhead or thank you cards.
Having these things with personal branding really sends the brand above and beyond.
It is a lot more difficult to ensure that every element of a brand is cohesive.
Allowing room for white space was a challenge; things like letterheads have a lot more white space than I am used to.
Patterns need to be versatile.
Creating patterns for my branding was challenging because I needed patterns that could be used in a variety of different ways.
Attempting to create universal patterns is something I’ve never done before, but thanks to this project I feel much more equipped to do so in future work as well.