PPP Self-Branding

The brief

The brief was a self branding task however we were encouraged to think past just making a design to go on a business card and to make something that represented us as an artist. This required looking back on ppp and reflecting on our practice. My aims for this brief is to not only create a brand that can potentially be spread across different mediums and works but to create something that represents me as an artist.

Research

The first thing I did was to search self branding on behance to get an idea of professionally finished products, this along with penny’s presentation about her own branding helped spark ideas in my head. A common theme amongst the branding task was a separation between the person and the brand so to speak. This is something I wanted to do myself, not using my name and instead using a made up name that I can develop in to a brand.

My name is Sophie Wendy Oldham, Wendy means Wander. I simply put wander into Google translate and switched through until I found something I liked. I settled on vaeltaa which is wander in Finnish. 

I really enjoy doing hand rendered type and wanted to create something bespoke so I looked at a book called “Handmade type Workshop” which features many artists doing small tutorials on various ways of creating hand rendered type. These are just some of the ones I liked and might try out. I made small notes on the pictures picking out the detail.

Production

After taking a long time to think about what it was I wanted to create for pp the answer I kept coming up with was ‘I don’t know’ so I decided to play on that and use that as my theme. I don’t know what style id like to present myself as yet and all I really know about my practice so far is I really like physical practices so I decided to just recreate my logo in a range of mediums. Being inspired by all the youtubers mentioned in my ppp blog, I decided to film the process rather than just show the end result and create a promotional film of sorts. To do this took planning. I had to plan out the individual process before hand so I could film it and not have to re do it over and over. I settled on a few simple ways of recreating y logo and some more complicated. I also chose photo screen printing and using the vinyl cutter as the end result of these processes would give me something I could give out in order to promote myself. Two birds with one stone. The idea is I can show design studios the video as an introduction to myself.

Conclusion

I really really like the outcome of this brief. I have something I can hand out to potential contacts and have also strayed away from a conventional business card etc. Going down the route of video was quite a challenge as I’m not versed in video editing software or even really well versed in cameras so it was difficult but I'm very pleased with the outcome. To develop this further I would probably spend more time focusing on the video editing to make something really impressive and feature more and varied processes.