CONCEPTION OF MY PERSONAL BRAND

Time flys, it finally comes, our last project of this semester. The 5th project of brand design 1 is designning my personal brand. Somehow I feel it is the hardest project because I will need to define myself in this brand. There is not that much freedom as I was designing other projects. I can define whatever I want in other projects, but I am already a person with the personality rightnow, how do I make others like it, remember it? I think that is the hardest part.

When I was thinking about which archetype I should choose for my brand, I first came up with who I am and what I can do. As a designer, I can do brand design, graphic design, hand drawing, and have a background of Chinese culture which can help me with cross culture design. I think the archetype that fits most is the Artist archetype, which is the creator and also the craftsman.

As the name, I decided to use one character of my Chinese name, which is also my favorite character in my name.

In English, It is Yu, which is converted from Chinese pronunciation alphabet "yù". They are actually pronounced differently even though with only that little tone mark difference in writing. It is actually a difficult Chinese character that most Chinese people can't recognize, which is one of the reasons why it is my favorite. In my entire life, I have never met anyone who has the same name as mine because of it. So, 彧 has kinda become my unique symbol among the people who know me. The other reason why I like it is because of its meaning. Unlike English names, each Chinese character has its own meaning. In Chinese, 彧 means "talented, elegant and thriving". I think it is also a good meaning for my personal design brand.

Mission statment:

Yu is a personal design brand focus on creating beautiful and practical designs for its customers. Its main creating contents are brand design, graphic design and hand drawing artworks. Yu can also provide a better cross culture design connected to Asian culture because of a deep understanding of it.

Singular idea:

For customers who are finding designs for their brand or products, Yu is the design studio that provides beautiful, practical and unique designs because it is always creating based on its customers’ needs and putting ideas and meanings in its designs.

Based on the name's meaning and my personality, I want my personal brand to be elegant, modern, simple and giving a quiet and thoughtful feel. And here are my mood boards for vibe, color and type based on that idea.

Vibe

Color

Type

The logo design was based on the name. Since it is a Chinese name, I used four versions of it to conceive my logo, which are "Yu", "彧", "yù" and "ǜ" ( ǜ is also a Chinese alphabet which sounds the same as yù ). Here are the sketches:

I got some different feedback from the class. It seems like each one has their own taste. some like the simplest ones, some like the abstract ones, some like the Chinese character, some like just the clear "Yu". I talked to Dan at last, he suggested a clear design which you can tell the name from the logo. He said the name is sweet, it would be good to see just "Yu" there clearly. Actually, I prefer the abstract ones than that because I feel like they are more special and interesting. I guess I will try to make several of them digitally to see how it looks before I decide.

#branddesign1 #personalbrand #yu