Personal Branding & Red Bird Updates

I wanted to talk a little bit about personal branding. This is a topic I actually feel qualified to discuss. I have been working as a graphic designer for 10 years now, and a good portion of that has been focused on branding. The thing about personal branding is, it seems much harder to pull the pieces together into a cohesive whole that I am happy with.

When you work on someone else’s branding you have conversations with them about how they want to position themselves, how they want to be seen. Sometimes we will pose silly questions to get people thinking about that face that they want to show the world: What kind of animal would you/your company be? Who would be your celebrity spokesperson?

With all of this information we start working on the visuals that go along with it, the logos, icons, illustrations, color schemes, etc. that will define the vision. But this is a limited view into the whole picture of a person or company, it is the face they want to present. When you work on your own branding it is more difficult, because you see all of yourself. And more than likely you see and feel all of the infinitesimal changes we go through as people every day.

How do you distill this overload of information down into a personal brand?

I think the first trick is to know that you won’t get all of yourself into a nice packaged little logo. The second is to be comfortable with the knowledge that in the future you may want to make some alterations to the branding. Allowing yourself imperfection is key, at some point you have to say it works, it fits for now.

For me The Red Bird Studio started off, not even as an actual thing. It started will an off hand comment back in about 2012. Someone commented that I looked like a little red bird dancing around in my new winter coat. Yes I was 26 years old and dancing around in the snow like a kid. It made me laugh, and it made me draw a series of little illustrations.

The main little red bird was a cardinal, I imagined myself as a cheerful cardinal. The rest were me simply riffing on a theme.

Shortly after this time my friends started having kids, and I wanted to make them gifts, so I made stuffed animals. I wanted to do something that showed who they were from so I decided to create a brand for the things I made. I went back to this moment in time because I identified with the spark of fun that had me drawing them in the first place.

The illustrations were cleaned up, a typeface was chosen and I was branded. These little birds were friendly, approachable, and in no way serious. Exactly the branding you want when you are creating things for kids.

Here we are 7 years later. My focus has changed. My life has changed. I have changed.

I don’t want Red Bird to just be about things I sew (though that is a large portion of my focus at the moment) I want it to encompass all of my artistic endeavors. My design aesthetic has changed, I have pared down and cleaned up how I work. I still enjoy the off set color blocks of the original logos, but I want something more streamlined, more adult. My work these days is much more about the craft and quality. The small finishes mean more to me than they did back then. It’s not just about a rush to a finished project, it’ not about creating any piece, it’s about a worthwhile piece.

So with this in mind, I started thinking about what I want, and sketching. I decided I wanted a logo that feels small and cohesive, where the icon can be used without the logotype and be recognizable. I wanted something that was clean, no more offset colors and hand-drawn lines.

What I wasn’t sure about could fill an ocean. So I started sketching, because thats how I work things out. I know lots of people who like to make lists of words that they feel kinship to, or mood boards to work through these kinds of problems.

Here are a couple of the many pages of sketches that happened while I was thinking about the next evolution of Red Bird. I considered whether or not the main bird should still be a cardinal, am I still a cardinal? It’s a very existential process.

In the end, I like where the cardinal came from, it just needed a new form. After a bunch of sketches I was gravitating towards the ones that fit into an oval. A little cartouche, a signature. (A cartouche was an oval or oblong enclosing a group of Egyptian hieroglyphs, typically representing the name and title of a monarch).

And to unveil the final product…. drumroll please

I am pleased with the outcome, the bird still feels lighthearted but it is simpler and cleaner now. I feel like this is a better fit for who I am and the work I am doing at this point in time.