Hi! I’m Liz. I’m a graphic designer by trade. For the past so many years since graduating college, I’ve been trying to motivate myself to work on self-initiated design projects outside of my 8-5 job. I haven’t had much luck, but this evening I happened to complete the first project in Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills. Now, I’ve had this book for years—I bought it a year or two after graduating—but it wasn’t until tonight that I fully attempted and completed project #1, which was to design your own logo. I ended up really liking my first design, which is pretty typical of me, but I also really liked my very last design. So much so, that I decided I wanted to keep track of every project I complete from the book, and so here we are. Here is my completed project #1: Hello, My Name Is.
I wanted my logo to be my name, because Liz is only 3 letters and how hard can it be to come up with a design for that, right? Wrong! As you can see from my sketchbook, I mostly rewrote my name over and over again in mostly similar but some different styles. My current logo is an “lb” for my initials, and one that I designed senior year of college. I didn’t put too much thought into it. My plan anyways is to give out all of my business cards and then release my redesign.
So the first part of this first project is to answer some questions about yourself; like what kind of design do you like, who are your favorite designers, and what kind of design do you want to be doing? I tried to keep those questions in mind while designing my logo, but I definitely got hung up on the letters of my name a lot. I’m pretty straightforward with my design style, and just life in general. I don’t like to beat around the bush—just give me the facts as they are. So I guess that translated into my design in a way; by focusing on just using the letters of my name and no fluff, I’ve created something that’s essential me. Huh. Well I already thought this project was a success but now I’m starting to realize how successful it was.
I think I’ll wrap this up by saying I hope you’ve stuck around this far and will stay with me as I make my way through this book. I don’t plan on following a strict timeline for this, since it’s never worked for me in the past, so I hope you’ll be patient! Thanks for reading, and have a day.
Design Diaries 