OUGD402: Self Branding (Feedback & Idea Development)

After discussing my current ideas with a few other students within my class, I got feedback on them and potentially new ideas to work with also.

One point made was to focus more on this idea of technology being a big part of my life and so to look at the design of my logo and identity and incorporate the shapes and style of particular pieces of tech e.g. a circuit board, microchip etc.

The shape of a circuit board can differ slightly from anything between a complete square or rectangle of combination of the two.

The sharp diagonals of the circuitry within the board is something I wanted to have within my branding as a subtlety that would only be recognised by fellow technology fans or others who know the underlying meaning.

One thing I noticed that could possibly be an extension of the branding is to create a smaller logo that would be recognised as my branding but would be used within smaller and less visible situations. If, for example, on a website my logo was shrunk down to fit at the bottom of the page it may not be legible, but instead the smaller (T)^2 logo above would be used.

I considered maybe trying to incorporate some of the circuitry shapes and lines itself into the individual letters to further add to the idea but when attempted it ruined the original subtlety I was going for and made it too tech based, giving off the impression it was branding for a I.T based company.

Another feedback suggestion was to consider different objects I could potentially send out to studios that would include my branding, to kind of introduce myself to them without me actually being there.

I wanted to consider relevant objects that I could send off and given a large portion of my this current branding idea is based around my glasses, something useful could be a glasses cloth. This would not only be useful for those will glasses, but would also function as a screen cleaner for things such as phones, tablets and laptop screens.

I personally think that sending off something useful and useable for those working within the studio would create a better impression than just a regular letter and would mean they would be constantly reminded of me and my branding every time the cloth would be used.

Mockups of potential cloths:

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.

OUGD402: CMYK Fine Art Exhibition

CMYK Exhibition

This exhibition was collated and installed by the first year fine art students and what an installation it was. The range of styles of work and the effort put into some of the pieces of work was amazing to see.

More than anything it was nice to be able to see and appreciate work that wasn't graphic design based, especially work that is so far from graphic design on the spectrum of art and design.

All of it was hands on, whether a painting, sculpture or compilation of various materials, visually it was massively different to what I'm used to seeing on a regular basis.

It was also different to see work that for the most part was all down to interpretation and didn't necessarily have an underlying concept or idea, like much of graphic design is.

The more and more exhibitions I visit, the more it drives me to want to at some point put on my own exhibition or collaborate with others to exhibit some of our work from our course. I think it would be good to be able to share our ideas with others and allow for other courses to experience the same as I did visiting this exhibition.