OUGD402: Self Branding (Initial Ideas/Thoughts)

Elliott Taylor

Initial Ideas/Thoughts

One of my first initial thoughts with my own self branding was given how much I'm into technology and how my life revolves around it, I wanted to somehow incorporate this into my branding.

Typically a lot of branding includes some form of greeting word such as hello, hi, hey etc. which is nice and pleasant. 

But I wanted to have something more personal and suited to me hence 'Yo'.

To accompany that I was exploring the shapes that would be associated with me, so for use of business cards etc. Originally I set out to use the regular rectangle shape but it seemed far too conventional. But something such as a hexagon felt more appropriate, because to me it's a more adaptable shape, due to the more sides it has.

The reason being for a QR code is that given how my technology is an integral part of my life and has been since a young age, I thought a small QR code to link the user to my website/work would be much better suited to me.

A second idea I had was to base it around a big underlying problem that's happened most of my life, that being the misspelling of my name, although my name is spelt Elliott it's often misspelt as Elliot hence the (T)^2.

Which is where I had the idea of linking this is with the fact that I would consider myself a logical thinker and problem solver, again linking back to this underlying concept of me being more of a mathematical person than writer etc.

So up to this point, I feel that I could in some way incorporate both ideas together to hopefully form my self-branding. Having the adaptable shape combined with the mathematical name would be.

I also feel as though the bracketed 'T' could also be a shortened logo of the full thing in itself, so at a smaller scale, maybe on documents or a website it would be identifiable as my branding without the whole name 'Elliott' being barely legible at a smaller scale.

Vectorised Original Idea

Further Development

I thought that I could someway try to incorporate the glasses into my design as they are already a bit part of my appearance and would portray me even further within my branding visually.

The colours come from my glasses directly, they're a tortoiseshell colour and so have a range of darks and lights within them.

I created a set of swatches from the glasses to choose from and experiment with:

Out of all the colours, the most appropriate seemed to be the two that are labelled, simply because of how neutral looking the colours are. The other swatches appear either too sharp and bright or too dark and dull looking.