Digital Identity

This assignment required me to analyse myself and come up with a visual identity, or a logo which could then be used for our website and so forth. I found this assignment really interesting, and created a large amount of paperwork, exploring various aspects of typography, lots photography shooting a 3d version of one logo idea, worked with brush and ink, scanning and combining all of this in the computer. I researched this quite a bit, reading Naomi Klien's “No Logo”, Christopher Simmons “Logo Lab”, and the first edition of “Logo Lounge”.

I'd love to be able to create strong iconic logos. It is something that seems simple, but I think is probably one of the most difficult things to do well in design. Paul Rand was a master of this, and I also see a lot of very interesting branding and logo work today in the motion graphics area, which I am most keen on. It seems to me that the big companies utilise talented designers to make cutting edge pieces that integrate the branding of thier companies such as Nike or MTV. Chris at Dstrukt is adept and turning typographic logos into dynamic 3d objects and basing much of this work around them.

My reflections on this project are:

I enjoyed working on it, got my hands dirty and experimented a lot, but I don't really feel that I have came up with a logo I am really happy with.

Four examples shown here show different angles. I put the most time and effort into the “K” idea, but Adam here at NWSAD didn't like it at all and urged me to use a digitised version of a hand-drawn one I did quite early in the process, as it rang true with my personality. I had trouble getting a decent reproduction from the scan, and wanted a vector version that could be used at any scale, so it was redrawn with a wacom tablet. This version (in red) was still a bit rough even though it had the right character, so I subtly reworked it again for my website with Illustrator. It will do for now, but I don't know if I'd want to use it permanently.