As part of my self-promotion material it was decided to design business cards which could be handed out at any future networking events and potentially sent out in packages to various studios and agencies. These can also be placed out beside my work at the graduation end of year show for any creatives to pick up if they feel like would ever be interested in working with me. The back of these business cards were the first to be developed. It was decided to play on the design of my CV within these, using a portrait format and placing my logo at the top with my details underneath, using the same colours schemes and typefaces as my CV and other personal branding in order to continue to create a consistency across all media and material.
In order to make the contact information on this back side of my business cards clearer, it was decided to create a set of symbols to place next to each contact method which, again, played on the style of my personal branding being more illustrative in style. It was found when experimenting with the use of these symbols in the design that the initial centred type alignment did not work as effectively. For this reason, this was manipulated to be left-aligned with the pink contact box in order to work better with the symbols which now feature in a column and make this information seem more structured.
Initially these symbols were experimented with simply using black outlines to keep the design fairly minimalistic, however it was thought that these symbols could be made more playful in changing their colour and style to the same as my logo, utilising pink with a black outline. It was also thought that this use of colour made the symbols stand out better and therefore also clearer to identify what the different contact methods are.
In order to make the symbols slightly more consistent, the size of the mail symbol was changed in size in order to be a similar size to the rest of the symbols. This also meant that the negative space between the symbols and the text were also consistent, which continued to help the structure of these business card design developments.
In addition, although the initial use of the pink contact box played on the design of my CV, it was thought that this was unnecessary to include since the whole purpose of business cards is to hand out all your contact information to people easily therefore people will understand this purpose without the need to write the word 'contact' on the cards themselves. The new addition of the symbols also helps the receiver understand the contact information better without the need for this box. Therefore, further developments got rid of this box and replaced this with a simple line in the same style as that used in my logo in order to break up the information slightly, creating a simple hierarchy as well as continuing to be consistent with my other personal branding. This design was also experimented with inverting the colours in an attempt to create variety amongst business card designs, however it was thought this colour variation did not work as effectively in helping information stand out since the yellow on a pink background seemed to dull the colours.
In developing a design for the front cover of these business cards it was decided to create a variety of different designs in order to make these seem more playful and play on the idea of describing myself as multi-disciplinary and an all-round creative. A further set of illustrations were created for this idea, one illustration being a computer mouse to communicate the idea of myself as a designer, a pencil to communicate myself as an illustrator and a print squeegee to communicate myself generally as a creative, in particular my interest in print. These took the same minimalistic style as the symbols used on the back of the business cards and used three shades of pink to work with the yellow background, continuing to play on my personal branding logo. These illustrations were created into patterns to create structure and creativity in their design rather than simply having one of each on each card.
Another idea was to utilise the same illustration created for stickers that could be placed on packages and mail sent out to studios and agencies featuring two hands exchanging a letter, communicating the idea of networking associated with business cards.
A further idea was to use bold typography rather than image to communicate my multi-disciplinary approach as a designer, describing myself on my CV and initial website as a 'graphic designer, illustrator and all-round creative', manipulating this into the typographic composition 'Design. Illustrate. Create.' For these developments, the text utilises the same typeface used for the contact information on the back design of these business cards, as well as utilising the same colour scheme as my logo with a black shadow that makes the type stand out. Different variations of this design were experimented with, such as separating the words with the line stroke featured on the back and in my logo and cutting off parts of the type.
Other variations based on this idea of using typography to communicate my creative practice further manipulated type styles, this time utilising the same typeface as used for my logo itself which is a more traditional serif style compared to the initial developments. It was thought this may produce better consistency with the back cover design since my logo is the most prominent feature on that side, however it was also thought that perhaps this type style is not as legible in the bold way it has been used and perhaps does not stand out as much as the first typographic developments. However, on the first typographic developments, the black shadow may have to be made more minimalistic to match the more subtle shadow featured in my logo.
No comments:
Post a Comment