Starting a Brand

Everything to do with my "brand", Chazmander, has been made entirely by myself, using creative editing softwares. From my Logo, to my Youtube Banner, everything was "hand drawn" and edited together to create what my brand is now.

I put a lot of effort and work into branding, even though it's probably subject to change as I get more experience, I wanted to show off the process of how my brand came to be. It certainly isn't the best but I am proud of what I was able to achieve over the course of a few days.

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As if it wasn't obvious from the frequent appearance of this design, this is my main brand logo. In order to achieve this "final design", I had to make and add lots of components together. The very first step started in Adobe Illustrator. I made a text box and pondered over a brand name. Chazmander is a nickname few have gave me because I was addicted to Pokemon go and Pokemon Yellow (gameboy colour), and Charmander has always been my favourite.

I used the font GROBOLD by Guy Buhry. I loved the cartoony look since it looked a bit playful, like me! I drew a few classic Charmander conventions on top of the font, for example, Charmanders flame tail, as well as colouring the inner curve of the letter C in peachy colour to represent his peach coloured belly. I also added some blunt teeth but they are very hard to see against a white background. I was happy with this logo! I was ready to use it as my logo when not only creating this website, but my logo for both my Instagram and my Youtube. However, the logo doesn't exactly convey a sense of photography or anything to do with media. So I made more changes.

I decided to add a coloured background to my original design, just to make it pop a bit more. I chose blue as a background colour since blue and orange and opposites on the colour wheel, and so offers a good contrast against one another. I wanted to add slightly more so my logo would hint at being media related, so I added film reels and a camera. Both these assets were also drawn by me in Adobe Illustrator.

I made this camera by combining a variety of shapes together In Illustrator. I used two rectangles, both curved and combined them to make the body of the camera. The sense was created by overlaying 4 different sized circles, two of which were a a peachy colour (i'm still trying to use charmers colour scheme within my designs). The other small details such as the buttons and eye view were drawn on using the brush tool. On a few occasions I would hold down Shift so I could draw a straight line (if you look closely you can see a few small errors where lines do not perfectly meet ends e.c.t). Despite only having basic skills at using Adobe Illustrator, I was quite satisfied with my design. I was aiming to have a cartoony 2D look so it fits in with my whole theme.

Similarly with the film reel i used a variety of shapes and the paint brush tool to create this asset. Originally I had designed this with the intention of it looking like the letter "A", so I could use it within my font, however when combining it, it looked ugly and didn't fit with the font at all. It was most likely because of my drawing style that I was unable to get it to fit with the font, but due to my lack of the program and my lack of talent for drawing, I was unable to redraw a better design, however I still wanted to use it, and this is what initially led me to fade it out in photoshop, and add it to the blue background.

When looking back over my assets, I realised by editing my camera asset slightly, maybe I could re-design it so the lens resembled the letter "C"? I did this and I really liked the idea, but I also liked my word logo too. My boyfriend, who I was face timing and was watching the whole design process, suggested I delete the "C" from the start of "Chazmander", and use the lens, which now resembled the letter C. Brilliant! I had to make a few tweaks to the colour of the camera since the orange of my font was the same colour of orange used for the body of my camera.

And that's how I ended up with this, my final logo... For now.