Last year we were asked to create a portfolio for the work we did within first year, which meant that we had to create an identity for ourselves then. At that point in my design career I felt that the mark which I had created reflected me as individual, as well as reflecting my background in Art and Design. However, over the past year I feel that I have grown as a designer, refined my working process and practice. I think that this is down to the experiences that I have had over the past year, in particular my work placement which helped me to become more independent. With this in mind I felt that I would need a new identity for myself as a designer.
I took to my sketchbook first to sketch out a few ideas, using my initials as these represent me personally. To help me visual ideas I reflected on the marques I drew for the 100 marques task we were set at the beginning of the year. Mainly my ideas focused on the initial ‘AW’ which I thought was simple yet effective, however, I also played around with the idea of ‘AB’ as I am often called Abs or Ab by family and friends. I wanted my identity to be personal which is why this idea interested me.
I then went into Illustator to experiment with some of the idea that I had come up with, and see how they would work with different typefaces. I tried initially with a few san serif typefaces which I thought would work well for the marque, but after consideration these didn’t look right. I started to think about the serif typefaces which I had and didn’t feel that any of them looked right with the look I felt I wanted. I used Adobe Typekit to help me find some different serif typefaces when I came across Abril FatFace, which I applied to the development work. This worked better, I liked the use of the serifs and how the characters complimented each other.
With the typeface now chosen I still need to think whether I was going to use AW or AB. I decided that it was best to ask in my next tutorial with my peers and Jay. I was drawn more to the idea of using ‘ab’ because I think visually the two characters looked good together they complimented each other, whereas the ‘aw’ didn’t do this as well and I think this might have been due to them both being within the x-height (there was no ascender or descender). I also felt that ‘ab’ was more personal to me. When I showed the ‘ab’ marque in the tutorial they thought that it worked really well and wasn’t confusing with Abbie Williams written underneath it. They seemed to like the personal connection to the marque, the fact that I had used a nickname rather than just my initials. This was really positive, I was glad they felt it wasn’t too confusing with the name underneath.
Abbie Louise Williams 