Final Project

 

For this assignment, we had to choose between creating a personal brand identity or to create a brand identity for the CNM department. As a marketing student, I felt that personal branding identity would better benefit me hence I went ahead with that.

When I first brainstormed the key aspects of my personal branding for the first presentation, I thought of key aspects that I would like to carry forth about myself. I want to be portrayed as a creative person, and a driven individual – but most importantly, I wanted to highlight my unwavering spirit against hardships that I have pushed through to show that I’m a strong and independent individual. To highlight a sense of femininity given that my area of interest lies in fashion and beauty, I tried searching up flowers that symbolise strength and independence. I finally decided to use the flower “gladiolus” as my symbolic flower.

After streamlining my key symbol, I had to choose a suitable colour palette that would complement my value, and also suit the feminine demeanor that I was trying to create.

I started out with these two colour palettes initially but preferred the harmony that is created by the first colour palette. I was concerned, however, by the dark tone of the overall palette and decided to include a contrasting colour in my finalised colour palette shown below.

In this final colour palette, I have chosen 2 lighter colours, and 2 darker contrasting colours to complement each other. The dark red colour here is the key colour for my palette that symbolises strength, resilience, passion, and femininity, effectively conveying my branding. With that, I started on my first collateral.

While coming up with my first logo, I created a few drafts and designs as I sought my tutor and classmates’ opinions.

 

and

While I loved the first logo so much because of the minimalistic vibe, I ultimately settled with the latter as it has symbols that better resonate with my overall branding. The symbol is clear, and I also used a calligraphic font to include the meaning of my Chinese name – adaptability and clean like water. However, based on the first peer evaluation, my tutor and some of my peers feedbacked that the drawing was to detailed and it might be difficult to see the logo when shrunk. Based on their feedback, I edited the flower to make it more abstract based on what I have learned from assignment 1.

I also changed to use a calligraphic font instead of drawing the letters out as it was taxing to edit the calligraphy every time I applied it on another collateral. I added some water droplets on the flowers to subtly imply the meaning of my name. The water droplets were done on photoshop – I made it grey, softened the eraser and erased the center, added some white patches for reflection, and used the brush tool to add some shadow.

 

 

 

Next, I came up with my name card. I knew I wanted something professional looking and minimalistic. However, I struggled hard as there was a fine line between minimalistic and plain. In my initial attempt, I came up with the following name card as inspired by another name card online.

However, it did not feel quite there yet, and hence, I played around with the colours. Finally, I came up with my final name card as shown below (number blocked for privacy reasons).

The card felt minimalistic, yet professional to me and even exudes a sense of elegance that suits the branding that I was also going for. Hence, I stuck with this theme throughout my entire brand guideline.

I came up with my resume that was similar to the above style for my resume. In my first attempt, I tried to keep my resume clean and minimalistic. While my peers did not give much feedback for this, my tutor Ms Zicheng felt that the following work was a little dull and did not stand out as much compared to the name card. She suggested changing the colour of the header to red to make it the main theme. I was also told to remove the colour blocking as it seemed chunky, and the information I showcased on top should not be placed there since it was not key information. 

Therefore, I edited accordingly and finally presented the final work shown below. 

The final product felt more impactful as I played around with darker and richer colours as compared to the muted tones I previously used. I also played around with the placement and decided to put my experiences on the right side instead as it felt more natural to the readers' eyes. 

I played around with the fonts, using serif font for the headers and san-serif fonts for the body. As san-serif fonts are more clean and minimalistic, I decided to use that for the majority of my texts so that it would not seem too messy. I also converted many words into illustration as I did not want my information to appear wordy and chunky from what I learned in the third assignment. 

Overall, I used PS (water droplet) and ID (alignment), AI (everything else) for my final project. I relied heavily on illustrator as my main tool of design. The final project had been taxing given the number of collaterals we had to submit but I have certainly learned so much, getting a taste of a designer's job in a real-life context. I have also learned how symbols, colours and fonts have to be consistent to create a certain branding and how these non-verbal cues can speak so much about what you want to convey.