You've been learning about advertising strategies, and how they're used by companies to sell you stuff. Much of what companies try to do is develop a "brand;" a set of values or ideas that come to mind when people think about a company or its projects. You may not have realized yet that you can use some of those same strategies to develop your own personal brand.

Assignment 1: Identifying your values

• List your top 6 values. Values are the ideas you want your brand to promote.
• Reflect on the ways your social media presence does or does not represent those values. You should write a minimum of 250 words.
• Describe your personal brand in 3-4 sentences. These should be like poetry, evoking feelings about you and your values.

Assignment 2: Design a Text-Based Logo

The Graphic Design Problem: Your client (Mr. Dreyfus-Pai) would like you to design a type based personal logo.  The logo will incorporate text and relate your name to art or graphic design.  Imagine you are a graphic designer or artist and you need to create a logo to go on your business cards, letter head, and website.

Specifications:

For this project you will need to produce a page of brain storming ideas, as well as a page of thumbnails.  Of the thumbnails you like best you will produce rough drawings to work out the details.

You will print at least three versions of your logo on 8.5″x11″ paper,  there will be no printing within a 1/2″ of the edge of the paper to account for the printer.  Your versions will show that your logo is effective without the use of color, scaleable (1″x1″), and also uses color effectively, and also works well on a dark background as well as a light background.  You may also incorporate other elements to your design such as a border, descriptive type, or additional versions.

The Research:

Look at the Logo Pond for a variety of logo ideas or Logo Lounge for thoughts on the latest logo trends.

Some other resources are: DaFont.com, a place where you can find thousands of different font types, download them to your computer, install them and use them in your logo design.

Graphic Designer David Airey has some good rules of thumb for logo design.  Check out some of David’s thumbnail sketches.  Check out his portfolio of logos he includes a link to his design process sketches and brain storms.  I expect you to sketch out several different ideas for your logo before working on the computer.  He also has some great tips to making an excellent logo.

Did I mention sketching is how you need to develop your logo ideas before using the computer?

As David says:

1. A logo must be describable
2. A logo must be memorable
3. A logo must be effective without colour
4. A logo must be scalable i.e. effective when just an inch in size

Brainstorm:

Begin to brain storm ideas you have about your personal logo design.  Begin by writing lists of things you are interested in, your family heritage, personal interests, favorite colors, favorite animals, birth sign, or anything that represents you.  Write down all of your ideas, bad ones and good ones.

Sketch:

After you have come up with a page of ideas begin to turn these words into images.  This will become a page full of thumbnail sketches which convert your ideas into images.  Once you have developed several ideas into images choose the ones you like best and draw them larger as roughs.

Then Compute:

Once you have some work on paper created you are ready to turn your roughs into vectored artwork.  Begin by creating your logo without color, use only black, gray or white.  This will help make it effective without color.  Once your design is complete then you will incorporate color.