February 2025
Service Design
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The rise of influencer culture and social media has produced a lot of online rhetoric regarding ‘building a personal brand.’ After doing some reading, I decided to start the process because of the discussion surrounding values in the workplace: I feel it’s important to work for an organization that shares some of my personal values. However, due to the nature of the UX/Product industry, I decided it was most important to focus on visual branding first - for my design portfolio.
A lot of the design portfolios I’ve seen have the designer’s name in a selected font as the website logo/home button feature. The first iteration of my portfolio had this but I felt as though it wasn’t very memorable; additionally, when I tested my site with users, it wasn’t blatantly obvious that the logo/my name was clickable and a fundamental navigation feature of the site.
I opted to create a ‘lockup’ style logo with a brandmark and my name attached to it. I went to a few lectures in college centered around logo design and the process that leads up to a final brandmark and design system in general.
Rather than doing anything overly complex, I decided to just have a simple ideation session and make a moodboard of imagery, styles and colors that I’m interested in.
After creating a moodboard, I noticed a new trends:
1. Presence of a lot of Earth tones, themes
2. Texture doesn’t seem as important as lighting
3. Cars: I love the aesthetic surrounding car culture and its overlap with the natural world
After the initial moodboarding, I stepped away and decided to passively brainstorm on ideas for a logo over the course of a few weeks. While reading a psychology textbook, I came up with an idea:
Based on the ‘left brain vs. right brain’ framework, I believe I tend to fall more within the ‘right brain’ side than the left. A lot of the skills associated with the right side of the brain are also skills associated with being a successful designer, researcher and manager. I wanted to illustrate this but in a way that was authentic to my personality.
Outside of digital design, I also love the design of everyday things (yes, the book too). Cars have always been interesting to me - huge metal boxes that carry people around. They’re hugely complex, considered a necessity in a lot of places and they all somehow manage to look uniquely different.
One of my favorite cars has always been the original 1970s Range Rover - designed by Charles Spencer King.
Charles Spencer King was a design engineer at the Rover Company (British Leyland); he was the chief designer of the original Range Rover. The original Range Rover was seen as being one of the first highly off-road capable cars that was also highly capable on the road. While the modern Range Rover is a luxurious status symbol, it was never intended for that purpose. Charles was quoted as saying:
“[The Range Rover was] never intended as a status symbol but later incarnation of my design seem to be intended for that purpose.”
The original Range Rover was about utility, highly usable design and being able to work in the real world - refinement.
Much like the incremental change that is associated with effective UX design, Land Rover has employed a similar tactic (until recently) with the original Range Rover. They have kept the overall design language but have updated components necessary to keep up with the auto industry’s safety regulations, technology, etc. I think it’s a great example of the type of design that makes the world so great: subtle, usable, beautiful.
I decided to showcase that I’m a right-brain individual who likes cars/product design by creating a simple graphic of the right headlight (right/passenger side of the car) of the Range Rover. Similar design language has persisted in other vehicles including the 1980s Toyota Land Cruisers and the Izuzu Trooper - it’s a ‘timeless’ classic.
I created a simple brand guideline of the brandmark, lockup and colors associated with both:
Unfortunately, orange is one of the least accessibility-friendly colors so it didn’t work well for buttons on my portfolio. Instead, I decided to revisit my moodboard (see above) and pick a color that would fit well with orange - both thematically and aesthetically.
To continue the theme of British automotive history, I decided to just pick one of my personal favorite colors: British Racing Green. I made it my secondary color with a lighter variant for hover states, etc.
Additionally, I originally used the ‘Lato’ font family for my portfolio/logo but decided to make a slight change to Inter - too many people associated Lato with Zoom nowadays.
