Picture says a thousand words

Have you ever tried to describe yourself in one word? An all-encompassing statement that tells a stranger what you're about. I suggest you try it if you haven't. It's a self-affirming exercise.

Well, that's what I've been working on the past few weeks. In my story-telling and metaphors class, I had to design a logo for myself. It took some deep digging to really find out who I am. Something that will be represented in a single mark. It was an interesting process. One of the first exercises we did was take an anonymous survey of what other people thought about each person in the class. Each person had to write a single adjective about each person. The results were pretty cool.

Unassuming. Confident. Nice. Smart. Stylish. Those were some of the responses I got from my classmates. I was pretty flattered. I took a lot of those words into consideration when I was designing my logo.

I really wanted to make it a reflection of my profession (to be). My first attempts made reference to a sheet of paper with a dog-eared corner. I really liked the mark, but it wasn't there. I didn't want to pigeon-hole myself as just a writer. One of my initial sketches included a speech bubble encapsulating my initials. It had no relevance to me. I just marked it down.

In our class, I was showing my first round of sketches. One of my classmates commented about how the speech bubbble could possibly be a thought bubble. That was the moment. That was the word that encapsulated me and my future career. Thoughts. I'm an ideas person. I'm also constantly milling things over. Thinking about random stuff that's only useful on Jeopardy. I moved forward.

I made another round of sketches. It was looking good. My thought bubble would not be the cutsy cartoon type. It would be simplified with clean-rounded edges. I also wanted to utilize my initials: AH. The logo would relfect the "a hah" moment when brilliance strikes.

Now to the computer. I made some initial comps with a palette of cyan, orange, kelly green and a dark indigo. It took quite a while to get the curves right in Illustrator,but I knew the one I liked about an hour-and-a-half in to the exercise. I think the logo might have a dynamic color. It's cyan for the time being. Take a look at the refined mark.