The Story Behind the Brand

A lot of ideas come from late-night sketching

All the way back in 2020, the world was opening back up enough that I could return for my sophomore year of college.

The Cleveland Institute of Art welcomed back students by hosting a mask design contest. I submitted two concepts, one of them was a late-night doodle I made of cute little blob faces mingling around. I didn’t think much of it and just submitted it after putting much more effort into my first submission.

Where It Took Me

Ironically, the doodle that I had just played with was selected for manufacturing and was handed out to students and faculty the first week of school.

My first project of my first graphic design class was to create a personal brand. I wanted something fun and light-hearted that showed my personality while maintaining a clean look. My professor happened to be wearing my mask design and I remembered that I had really enjoyed just drawing little faces.

I decided that I was going to take inspiration from what I had previously done. I created new faces in illustrator so they could be cleaned up a little more, picked out a font and color scheme, and it all went from there.

Turning Into a Brand

For my logo, I chose a face from the selection within my pattern and changed the colors to create an image that would be both recognizable and easily sized down.

Then, I created a repeat pattern from the faces that could be used as a background or an accent banner.

The final step was to bring that branding to different forms of stationary, web assets, social media, and show boards.