Graphic Design & Visual Design
Type: Branding, Visual Design, & Graphic Design
Tools: Canva
Logo development is a great way to utilize multiple design tools. Logos can be complex or minimalistic, but conveying a concise message is vital.
Cohesive design choices are instrumental in making your brand recognizable and memorable. Merging images with logos personifies your brand within your target segment. I chose Canva to design these projects. In each case, the designs are driven to spark on-brand conversation, explore creativity based on themes, and elevate existing brand-based elements.
I will explain my process for three projects in this section. They are all works in progress but see a standard solution creating dialog grown from inspired design choices.
My collaboration was with a dear friend, Megan. We met in design school and became fast friends. She is young, energetic, and a budding entrepreneur. She was looking for ideas and had chosen some fonts implemented in several logo designs.
I thought her first pass was difficult to read, so she shared the file with me via Canva. I moved the text around and asked her a few questions about design and color. She revealed she loved black cockatoos.
After some research, I used that information as inspiration for themes and color. I presented her with a color palette and made some quick mock-ups based on the unique tail feathers of the black cockatoo.
As she moves forward in her decision-making, she has a solid foundation and has since created her brand's mood board. I love collaborating.
This is a sample of my brainstorming and creative flow in Canva, generating inspirational themes to promote conversation. I find this helpful when developing supportive elements for brands. They can be utilized for logos, merchandising, or promotion.
By merging simple ideas with elements, these mini-projects convey a strong message. They are to express emotion and social states of mind. I stacked images and left nothing unaltered in some way, weaving components together to make a story.
The logos in this section are created to be clean and minimal.
The first one is for a web development client who initially contacted me with a request to get his site functional as soon as possible. His website was unresponsive and appeared to have many additions of projects over the years that lacked consistency.
Within two weeks, I debugged the many front-end issues, and I presented a more cohesive design presentation merging my changes with the visual tone previously established.
He contacted me recently to create a logo for him and email signatures. While I worked on his requests, I offered him a fresh favicon that began a new dialog regarding visual direction regarding his logo and email signatures.
The link to his site is below.
These are versions I am playing with for my logo. As with most personal design projects, it is a work in progress. The designs started with a fun project of me as a child with afro puffs and a laptop I designed in Adobe Illustrator. The logo has evolved into a minimalist take on my site domain name, reeses.design.
Canva can be a great starting point. It is like Figma in design and development. They shake the creative flow from your head while working on an iPad is like making notes for a future project.
I also like integrating Canva within my toolbelt. I can take a project to Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to personalize it from there, adding special touches and creating quality SVGs, EPS, PNG, or PDF files.
