Visual Identity – My Logo Professional Practice LAUIL602 Alex Patrick
Initial Ideas At first, I wasn’t 100% sure what sort of thing I wanted to use to represent me and my brand, or if I even wanted a specific thing that people could associate with me, as I change my mind and how I feel about my visual signature so often. After some thought, I decided it would be a good idea to make a logo, as the majority of artists I follow seem to have some sort of logo, even if they don’t use it much, it’s there if and when they need to. So I figured perhaps I best have one too, and even if I do change my mind about it, I can always make a new one or edit the one I already have. I think a logo can be a good thing to have as it is like an image that IS you and your work, it’s what people see on your shop or your social media and see as you.
Making a Logo To make things easier for myself, I decided it would be best to use a preexisting image of mine. Not only is this for simplicity reasons, but also if the logo is a part of a pre-existing piece of work I’ve made, I think people are more likely to associate the logo with me and my brand. To start with, I looked through all my pieces of work that I had made digitally to see what I could possibly take from one to turn into a logo. In the end, I chose to take a peach from my Call Me By Your Name print. I chose this because the vast majority of my work features some sort of plant or fruit and felt this would tie it together nicely. That, and because of the colour of the peach, as most of my work incorporates pale pinks and peachy tones so I felt this was another good way of representing my work. I also chose the peach as it is take from my best selling print. My Call Me By Your Name print sold out within two weeks of me putting them up on Etsy and the digital piece was featured on a Call Me By Your Name Instagram account to over 6k followers, so it is a very popular piece and a lot of people have seen it. So hopefully they would recognise the peach as being symbolic to my brand.
The First Logo
Revisiting My Visual Identity Logo After using my logo as my Etsy profile image for a while, I realised I was unhappy with it. I struggle with type and it’s definitely going to take a lot of work before I can consider myself anywhere near good at it, and the type on this logo just lets the whole image down. That, and over time I have gone off the idea of using the peach in my logo. So like I said, a logo is good to have because you can come back and change it when you need to. Since making my initial logo I felt that my work had improved/developed quite a lot and I knew I needed to have a better logo. So I got to work designing one. Again, I decided to use a piece of existing work as I feel this works better if people have already seen the design and already associate it with you. I chose a hand drawn/digital collage I had made of a hand holding a bunch of wildflowers I scanned in. I also added some type, but opted for some pre-made type on my computer, rather than using my own as I think it looked quite messy last time.
Revisited Logo
Thoughts Looking back, I am so pleased I decided to revisit my visual identity and change my logo. I think the new one represents me and my work a lot better than the first one did. I think my revisited version is a lot better than the first, it looks more professional than the first one did and definitely represents the work I make and my work aesthetic better than the first one. It includes a lot of the things I nearly always incorporate in my work, like a hand drawn sketch, flowers and pastel colour tones. I am really happy with it and am now using it across all of my social media platforms.