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.
May 2010
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.
July 2012
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.
August 2012
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.
February 2013
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.
September 2013
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.
May 2015
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..
