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Making the brand
23rd October 2006
I thought it would be cool to talk a little bit about how I came up with the branding for danieloliver.co.uk. Why I did certain things the way I did and the process of putting all of my ideas together to get to the final result you see on this site currently.
Having designed numerous other personal websites before such as Solution:Web and JustDan, I was looking to break away from the two brands that I had already created and make a fresh start. danieloliver.co.uk was a completely new site with no brand attached to it, so there was a chance to make it whatever I wanted it to be. When starting a new design for something, whether it be a logo or a website design, I always try and get my ideas down on paper first to give me something to work with. I find it’s much better to get things down on paper before taking it into photoshop or any other graphics design package you may use. Sometimes when I try jumping straight into my graphics design software on my computer I have too many ideas at once and don’t generally have any idea of the direction I want to take. Paper is easier, quicker and allows you to rapidly develop and expand upon ideas without too much effort. Another good thing is you don’t have to be good at drawing. Just scribble your ideas, the important thing is that if you can understand and see what you’re trying to achieve. If no one else can then that doesn’t matter until the final result is on the screen in front of you.
The first thing that came to me when opening my sketchbook was that I wanted to have some sort of symbol or icon in the logo. Not just danieloliver.co.uk with a fancy typeface and colours. I wanted to really try and design something that related to the name of the site and me. An idea I had for this symbol was to and merge or blend the D from Daniel and O from Oliver into one solid object. You can see from the following sketches how I developed my idea for this. (Please excuse the quality of these images as they were taken on my camera phone, as I haven’t got a scanner with me)
After deciding on the symbol for the logo I then moved on to the type that was going to be used and how to incorporate the symbol with this. Again, this is all done in the sketchbook to start with to get a solid idea of what I was going to have to design on the computer. You can see how I started off with the idea of placing the logo in front of the text, then placed in the top left and then between the text of my first and second name. After this I then decided I would place more emphasis on the symbol by making it bigger. I liked the symbol. So the natural step was the place the symbol/icon, whatever you want to call it, above the text and match the width of the text. The following image shows this process.
Finally after deciding on the design for the logo it was time to fire up the beloved powerbook and get down and dirty with Fireworks. This was surprisingly quick from start to finish, having the idea on paper to refer at times certainly helped speed the process. The logo was put together in fireworks by starting just with two simple letters, “D” and “O” and then there was a lot of customising with the pen tool for all the paths to get it all looking just right.
Colour selection is probably something I should also talk about. I went with green as my primary colour to give the brand a fresh look and feel and also to hopefully represent growth to a certain degree. By growth I mean the growth of the brand and myself as I take on board new skills and technologies while here at uni. Blue was selected for the secondary colours along with shades of grew which would be used on certain elements across the site.
So that pretty much shows you the process and thought behind the danieloliver brand. Next up I’m going to document the process behind building the site. This may well come in a few parts, depending on what I choose to discuss.
