SELF-BRANDING: Paolo Caston
As a web designer who also writes codes for creating websites and other web applications, I always use the symbols > and <. These symbols are mostly used in <html> codes and in <?php> codes. Coming from a minimal point of view of eliminating all non-essential forms, I decided to remove the vertical line in P and incorporate >,< symbols for my logo. It ><, which looks similar to an “X”. I thought of having X as my symbol initially, but decided against it because I didn’t want my brand to be perceived as the generic and unrecognised “Brand X”. X is often used as a variable whenever the answer is unknown or ambiguous, concepts I didn’t want to align my brand with. So I played a bit with the shapes in Illustrator. I duplicated geometric rectangle shapes, positioned one vertically and the other horizontally at a 90° angle. Then, I tilted it up at a 45° angle, duplicated the > shape and rotated it 180°. Finally, I aligned it to resemble the letters P and C.
