As you may have heard, I have a new website! This is exciting for a few reasons. It’s still new and shiny, it works faster/smoother/better than my last one, it’s extremely easy to update and last but not least I was able to work my new branding into it, which is what inspired this whole thing in the first place.

I wouldn’t say that my previous “branding” was half-assed, but it wasn’t really anything that I had worried about very much. At the time of creating my previous website and marketing material I more or less looked at the cost of a designer, died inside and went ahead and typed out my own name on some business cards in Photoshop. It worked just fine for me as I was just at a stage where I just really needed local publications to learn my name and my work. That’s not to discount the value of solid branding at all (and some might argue that it was perhaps even more important at that stage of the game), but my main priority was just being able to show as much of my work to as many people as possible, so that’s where all time/money/resources/effort went.

Now, I’m certainly not dominating my corner of the industry or anything like that at all, but I’m much more comfortable with where I stand now vs. 3 years ago with the work I’ve done and am doing. It just seemed like it was time to start to finesse the finer points of my business, starting with a better web presence and a more professional (hopefully) brand that can extend across all aspects of my business from website to business cards to invoices to my portfolio and so on and so forth.

Enter: Trevor and Aftermodern Lab. Trevor came as one of many recommendations from the fine folks at Mason (who I’ve worked on a few projects with previously), but his work stood head and shoulders above the rest to me. I’ve been looking for a designer who is extremely talented with all things font related for a very long time and Trevor fit the bill perfectly. I know next to nothing about what makes text look good, but I know what I like, and thankfully Trevor and myself appear to be on the same wavelength as far as visuals are concerned.

What started as rambling and notes in a coffee shop eventually ended up in some solid ideas and samples passed back and forth. I think there were something like 20+ options overall in the end. Here are a few samples of the process, and who knows maybe it’s something I’ll revisit in awhile:

Once I had kind of established what I was liking and what I was not liking, we started to tweak and fine tune things a bit until eventually landing on the basic design that I was going to go with:

From there, a winner was selected and Trevor tightened things up where they needed it and worked his magic to finish it up, which brings us to where we are now:

Next up: portfolio etching, leave behinds and maybe a tattoo on my face.