Design a personal brand and logo system for my own creative practice, rooted in the things I love and the way I like to work: the outdoors, the convergence of different creative skills, and the orderly, organic beauty of topographic lines.
I set out to build a logo and brand system for myself and my freelance work. I did the brainstorming, the concepting, the sketching, the design, and the final brand system: all of it.
Goal
Build a brand and logo system for myself that actually felt like me. As a director and creative director working across a lot of different kinds of creative work, I wanted an identity that captured both the range of what I do and the way I approach it. It started with a brainstorm that landed on four words: grounded, nimble, assured, and sustainable. Those became the foundation for everything that followed.
Approach
Two ideas pulled the design together: topography and convergence. Topographic lines have an organic, natural feel but stay orderly, which fit how I like to work. Convergence spoke to the way I bring different creative skills into one practice. I anchored the concept in a place close to my heart, Paradise Valley in Kings Canyon National Park.
Process
I did a lot of iterating and sketching, then used AI to smooth outlines and add structure and rules to the design as it came together. The color palette came from one of my favorite places in the world, the American Southwest, pairing a turquoise with a clay red drawn from the red rock.
The system
The full system is documented in a brand guidelines document, covering the logo, colors, typography, and motifs.
The name-only lockup, for places where the mark is already present or the space is too tight to carry both.
Alongside the logo, I created a set of design motifs that carry the identity across the website and other materials, giving the brand room to breathe and stay consistent wherever it shows up.
The wash used as a wide overlay, sitting behind a full-width band without competing with the type in front of it.
The same wash as a repeating tile, used at low opacity behind sections across the site.
Process image — contour studies traced from Paradise Valley in Kings Canyon, with the river picked out in turquoise once the lines were in place.
Process image — an early line-weight study, before the contours were thinned enough for the terrain to read.
Process image — a dense contour field with the river running through it, testing how much detail the mark could carry before it turned to noise.
Process image — the watershed variation on its spec board: fewer contour lines, each smoothed to a continuous curve, the river left unchanged.
