I added a new page to the site back in September: Previous logos for hellomelissa.net. The page shows the previous logos I’ve created for this site and tells the stories behind each one. If you’re into graphic design or the evolution of my website (or websites in general), be sure to check it out!
If you have questions about how I decide to brand my site and the designing that goes with that, please ask and I’ll answer in a future post.
In my day job, I do document and graphic design for corporate training materials. (Check out my LinkedIn profile for more info.) Most of my work is done for established brands, which means there isn’t really a lot of room to play. I satisfy my need to experiment (and use hot pink!) in the logos and branding I create for hellomelissa.net.
This was the first time I actually purchased a font for myself. (Glengary NF). This wordmark isn’t particularly special design-wise, but the clean, easy lines of the typeface really appealed to me.
I was getting itchy for a change, but didn’t want to muck around with a new colour palette. The font I chose (Love Ya Like a Sister, free on Google Web fonts) was a definite departure from my previous one. I like a lot of Kimberly Geswein’s work, and I wish I could use it more in my day-to-day work, but I think it would scare the suits.
I liked the previous logo, but I got itchy again in a few weeks. As much as I liked the handdrawn feeling of Love Ya Like a Sister, I missed having clean lines. I also decided I was going to lose the hot pink and go to shades of purple. I purchased this font (JennerikInformal™) and created another basic wordmark.
I came up with this logo quickly after spending some time applying a new responsive theme to the site. I love this font (ChunkFive Roman) and it looked great on my favicon and Facebook avatar for the site. I experimented with a few different backgrounds, but never really landed on anything I loved. I did bring back the hot pink in a smaller dose.
I seem to get itchy for new logos around the same times of the year: early fall and mid-winter. I’ve been wanting to play with a handwriting-style font for awhile, and when I found this font (Jennifer Lynne by Brittney Murphy), I decided it was time. This logo took more time than the others once I found the font. I spent a lot of time making sure the letters joined up like real handwriting would. I spent a lot of time in Adobe Illustrator fussing over the kerning and connections between each letter. I’m happy with the results. I managed to keep some hot pink in there! My website’s theme tends to look better on darker backgrounds, but I feel like I can change up the background without having to redo the logo at this point. That will be a good way to keep things interesting and help me practice my pattern tiling.
Handpainted/watercolour-style script typefaces are everywhere right now. I kept seeing new ones crop up in the various design newsletters I receive. When I decided to redesign hellomelissa.net’s logo and site this time around, I wasn’t sure if this was where I wanted to go. It felt like this type style would be too trendy. Then I remembered that a personal website can be trendy, because it’s easy for me to change it up when the trend passes. I don’t need to go through an entire art department or rebranding process. It’s all mine and I have complete control! It took me a few days to choose a typeface (I was waffling between being on-trend and some other styles), but once I did, the logo was built fairly quickly. I loved the description the creator wrote for Smitten – “a hand-inked, ‘semi-script’ font with tight kerning, and a fun, imperfect baseline. It’s nice and bold, plus a little gritty”. It lived up to the description and met my need to balance between girly, grungy, and fun. I wiggled some of the individual letters around to make it look that much more imperfect. I used one of the vector freebies that came with the font to create the dot (which was naturally done in my on-brand shade of pink). I was also thrilled to support an independent designer through Creative Market. I hope they treat their sellers well – I really enjoyed perusing this site and will likely shop there again..
