Food Wine Marcy
A personal brand identity for author Marcy Carriker Smothers.
Project Brief
Design Challenge: Who is Marcy Carriker Smothers, and how could a brand represent her professional identity?
Marcy is the author of Eat Like Walt, Snacks: Isle by Isle; A Walt Disney and Disneyland historian; A TV and Radio personality; and a lifestyle influencer.
A logo and branding guidelines were developed for Marcy Carriker Smothers and were then disseminated into collateral marketing and website design.
Skills & Tools Used:
Final Designs
The final logo utilizes both Marcy’s online personality “Food Wine Marcy” and her full name. The typographic set includes a display font, geometric heading font, and sans-serif body copy. While the logo remains simple with just two colors—a full set of colors were carefully crafted incase designs needed to be expanded in other media formats.
Website Design
The website design was based off of Solopine’s WordPress theme. I changed out the typography and color to follow the branding guidelines.
Marketing Assets
With a final logo, type, and color I created an email signature and business card design for Marcy to use when communicating and promoting herself.
Discovery & Design Process
After sifting my way through Marcy’s books, website, and interviewing her I was able to start a few wordplay lists. These lists explored Marcy’s industry, what exactly was her niche in those industries, and then a few descriptors to identify aspects of her future brand.
Industries
- Author
- Food and Wine
- Children’s Author
- Historian
- Pop Culture
- “Celebrity”, “Personality”
- Radio, Podcasts
- Social Media
- Lifestyle Influencer
Industry Niches
- Food & Wine
- Cooking at Home
- Food Explorer, Adventurer
- Disney
- Walt Disney’s Life
- Disneyland in Walt’s Era (1940s–1960s)
- Communitarian
Descriptors
- Fun
- Hangout with Marcy
- Approachable
- Insatiable Curiosity
- Enthusiasm
- Community
- Sparkly, Juicy
- Adventurer, Boundless Energy
- Lifestyle Influencer
- Whimsical
Names, Titles & Taglines
- Marcy Carriker Smothers
- “Food, Wine, and Marcy”
- “Food Wine Marcy”
- Food · Wine · Marcy
- “Disneyland Historian”
- “Time Capsule of Walt Disney”
- Walt Disney Historian
Design Research
I surveyed a few figures within Marcy’s industries to gain an understanding of how I might approach a professional personal brand. There were some take aways regarding color use and typography. I even noticed that some professionals seemed to correlate their outfits with their branding elements.
Typographic Survey
I searched a few different font banks for potential typeface candidates. This would be the basis of the logo design, so it was important to do a proper search and experimentation. Once I had a large collection I started sorting them into categories such as: Elegant/Refined, Personable/Charismatic, Energetic/Playful, and Periodic. I tried to stay in categories that corresponded with the wordplay descriptors to retain creative boundaries.
Logo Iterations
Once typefaces were narrowed down to a few I started playing with them to see where they could lead me. I worked with the typefaces in black and white experimenting with arrangements and trying variations on name. At a certain point in this development I moved into color exploration and continued to push the design.
Conclusion
After the creative process was complete we arrived at a new collection of branding elements: bright warm colors and trendy typefaces—all which summed up Marcy’s personality concisely.
I pulled together samples of typography, color, and imagery to compare the branding before and after the project:
This project was made by OptiRev for Marcy Carriker Smothers (2018).