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Project Brief

Background + Objectives

Marcy Carriker Smothers 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. I designed a new logo and brand guidelines for Marcy. I applied the new branding to a set of business cards, and a WordPress website.

My Role + Stakeholders

I was the lead designer, project manager, web designer, and developer. I worked directly with the client. I had support from marketing managers on content.

Skills Applied
Brand Design
Web Development
Logo Design
Technology Used
Illustrator
InDesign
Photoshop
WordPress
HTML
CSS
Business Context

Final Design

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.

logo design
Final logo design
typography and color styles

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.

marketing assets mockup

The website design was based off of Solopine's WordPress theme. I changed out the typography and color to follow the branding guidelines.

website design mockups

Creative 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.

design discovery details

Competitive Audit

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.

Design research for personal brands

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.

typographic survey

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.

logo design iterations

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:

old brand styles
Original branding elements pulled from Marcy's blog
new brand styles
New branding elements by comparison
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Hey, I'm Jacob!
I'm a versatile designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can view more case studies in my portfolio for product design or graphic/web design projects. Add me on LinkedIn!