Hey Behance folk!
I thought I'd put together a proper breakdown of my personal branding journey, and walk you through my new logo (2D, 3D and animation), website and showreel. Just for context, I worked on most of this throughout 2021 in the lead up to my leap from full-time studio animator to flying solo as a freelancer.
Establishing a solid personal brand for myself was an integral first step before embarking on freelance life. And now that I'm in full-swing of managing my own time, taxes and projects, it's super rewarding to look back at all the work that went into ye ol' personal brand.
So let's break this baby down – hopefully it'll be interesting to some of you.
LOGO
It all started with the logo. The logo I was using before this redesign was a hastily put-together little serifed 'M'. I kinda liked it at the time, but hey, that was ten years ago, and it simply had to go!
Old vs New
My initial logo sketches. The top left scribble is something I needed to scrawl down so I didn't forget. I then started refining and figuring out the shape in a little more detail.
Some early development. Figuring out how the mark works at different scales and different levels of detail and rounding.
LOGO 3D
Procreate's 2D animation to Cinema 4D's 3D animation
WEBSITE
For my website, I mocked up some designs in Photoshop to first establish the general look and grids of the main pages.
Once I got somewhere I was happy with, I needed to figure out how to build the darn thing. It was tough because I didn't really want a generic web template, but I'm no web developer! I eventually came across Webflow which offered a huge amount of customisability, yet had the tools to implement certain things that I wouldn't have been able to create from scratch.
I wanted the website to be clean and simple to navigate, but also loved the idea of sprinkling in the exploded logo around the page to break up the tidiness of the layout grid. Idk, I like dismembered body parts – call me what you want.
Final website design. This is one of the mockups created in Photoshop to figure out the layout, which is very close to the final live version.
Final Website
LOGO (EXP)LOADER* ANIMATION
I wanted to create a unique and snappy loading animation for when people first arrive at my website (while the images are downloading). I decided to have the different parts and limbs that make up the logo mark explode out, then quickly magnetise together.
I roughed out the animation frame-by-frame in Procreate for the iPad (time-lapse below), then brought that rough animation into After Effects for a little clean-up and to vectorise it (ready to export for web).
*Sorry, I couldn't not make that joke.
Hand drawn animation from Procreate (left) After Effects Clean-up (right)
Frame-by-frame animation - Procreate timelapse
Logo Reveal
Remember I mentioned that old logo? Although I'm but a humble nobody (or maybe because of this) I thought just swapping out my decade-old avatar for the old one might be a bit confusing to some. "What's this strange logo, who's this person? I don't remember following them!".
So I decided to literally give my old logo 'the boot' as a way of kickstarting the transition to the new.
Well...I thought it was a fun idea anyway.
