Building My Brand: Elements

I spent the entire fall quarter developing my personal brand ‘Jaime Bui’ where I showcase myself as a marketing professional. I began with drafting a creative strategy filled with my purpose, values, objectives, and elements. These elements included colors, fonts, logos, a tagline, tone, and associations. As I begin to finalize my brand image, I also have been reflecting on my thought process behind it all.

I first started to develop my brand logo. I was very unsure about how I wanted it to look since this would be the primary image associated with myself and my brand. I had some shapes and elements in mind that I was attracted to and knew would fit with myself. This included stars, hearts, little sparkles, and a ribbon bow. I began by looking at various logo templates on Canva for some inspiration, making note of the ones I liked, and changing the templates to be personalized with my name. I played around with different shapes, colors, and elements. Below I have some saved drafts of different logos I created and messed around with.?

I then later came across this template shown down below which I switched out with my initials and name. As you can see in the different potential logos above, many of them had stars and sparkles, however, this logo did not. I then wondered if I could somehow add a bow to this logo and make it look aesthetically pleasing. For some time, I had left this draft in the middle below as is.

One day I then became inspired by the shape of a stamp, its scalloped border around a square or rectangular shape. I then put my drafted logo into this shape and moved the bow to be at the top corner rather than right in the middle. This way my initials would not be blocked either. My brand logo was then born. To further build my logos, I made multiple variations including my name or not, tagline, and a horizontal variation.?

My fonts were easily chosen when I browsed through a tone of font examples until I came across two I liked, one for bigger headers (tan meringue) and one for smaller texts (cardo). As for my brand colors, I knew I wanted to use lighter pastels since I always gravitated toward these color tones. I then settled on using baby blue and light pink since these were two of my favorite colors. I added the color orange as well to warm up the color palette because I always loved the color combination contrast between the colors blue and orange. After choosing these colors, I knew I at least needed one dark color to use for my text’s font colors for easy reading, so I chose a warm dark chocolate brown. As much as I wanted to use white for a regular background color, I kinda thought that was a boring choice for myself and so then came in a light cream ivory. Below my brand colors and fonts are swatched.

My brand tones were more simply developed as I wanted to replicate my personality in my brand. The keywords I used to describe my brand tones were: professional casual, sincere, and relevant. As I spent some time determining my five senses associations, this ended up being a combination of some of my favorite things. For taste, I chose my favorite fruits and drinks. Under the sense of smell, I used notes that I found within the perfumes I use. My associations for look are associated with my brand tones of being simple, professional casual, clean, and girly. The senses of touch, hearing, and sight were chosen associations by things I wish to surround myself with. Warmth, fresh, comfort, and love were under touch. Music and laughter are within hearing because I love to listen to music and make other people laugh and smile. Many of those who know me well, know that I also do this thing where I whistle a very specific jingle. Because of this whistling is also under my brand association of hearing.

After developing all these aspects for myself, my brand elements were then finalized allowing me to continue building the rest of my strategy and portfolio integrating all of these elements anywhere I could.