Looking back 2-3 years ago I was at stage in my career where I was steadily increasing the amount of freelance work I was getting and was making a bit of a name for myself in my local community as the 'go to guy' for anything graphic design. Now this sounds great on the face of it, but all the while I had a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that my self promotion and company branding was shockingly poor considering I am offering design work to clients. This little voice eventually grew louder and louder until it was all I could hear and I decided it was time to seriously consider what Wilkinson Graphic Design looked, felt and sounded like.
At this time I knew I was going to build a full comprehensive brand that would work across both digital and print platforms and also lend itself to social media. However, platforms weren't the issue, the issue was coming up with a concept for the brand. I've always said that designers are the hardest thing to brand, not only are you trying to brand something which is about branding (I mean, what does that even look like?) you are also held to an extremely high standard as you are portraying the service you provide through the branding. For weeks I was playing around with ideas in my head about what Wilkinson Graphic Design could look, feel or sound like and as cliché as it sounds, it came to me out of nowhere.
Birth of the Ploctopus
I definitely had it in my mind that the concept of Wilkinson Graphic Design was uniqueness and individuality, something that I could provide my clients with. I was considering metaphors for uniqueness and things that could represent this idea visually. What I came up with was some kind of creature, a mix between an octopus and a platypus (a ploctopus if you will). This strange abomination embodied everything I wanted to say about Wilkinson Graphic Design, it was fun, different, interesting and creative. I also took the meaning deeper and explained how the octopus, among other things, are associated with multitasking due to their many limbs and strategic nature. The platypus, on the other hand, represented different elements. It's made up of various animal parts, a duck bill, an otter-like body and a beaver-like tail. I translated this into a 'jack of all trades' analogy, where being a freelancer requires you to be multi-skilled not only in design tasks but business savy as well. These two unique animals mashed together became the driving force in what eventually became my brand.
Along with this creature, which I had created into an icon constructed from circles, I also required other brand elements including fonts, colours and tone of voice. In regards to the tone of voice, this had already started constructing itself alongside the creation of the ploctopus, things like uniqueness, individuality, fun, approachable, adaptable were all coming together to help inform the remaining brand assets. At that time it was quite on trend to use dark greys/blacks in conjunction with a vibrant pop colour to create impactful visuals. I took this onboard with my branding and used an off-black, pure white and bright yellow to build visuals. The visuals included gradient mapped images (another common trend of the time) and bold san serif typefaces.
I now had all the building blocks to produce collateral I was proud of and had more of a connected feeling to it. The main body of work produced off the back of this was my website. Using all the elements discussed above I built, what I felt, was a pretty decent portfolio/services website. It had a nice blend of project examples as well as all the stuff you would expect to see on a services site including contact forms, quote generator, testimonials, blog etc.
This website and branding has served me extremely well over the last few years in bringing new business and giving me a strong platform in order to promote myself. The brand was transferable and allowed me to produce engaging collateral which was unmistakably 'Wilkinson Graphic Design'. However, as previously mentioned, the visuals were based on what was on trend at that point in time and while that serves for great outcomes, it does slap a 'best before' sticker on the brand as trends tend to come and go. This is what has brought back that little voice in the back of my head, telling me its time to think about updating my brand, again.
Back to the Future
Now, fast forward to 2018 and I'm considering a re-brand. You might think that a rebrand within only 2-3 years is a bit drastic, especially given the success and recognition the ploctopus has brought over those years. However, something to bare in mind is that my circumstances have also shifted during those years. When I first created the ploctopus brand I was aiming at getting as much freelance work as I could and build up a reputation, as freelancing was my only design output at the time. Since then I have had two full time design roles in design agencies and this has resulted in a shift in my freelance priorities. I am currently still freelancing on the side of my full time role but I have activity reduced my self promotion as I am much more selective with the amount of work I take on, the majority of which is from existing clients who come back due to the raport I have built with them. This means that the approach my branding was taking, of being attention grabbing and service driven, doesn't really apply anymore. This, accompanied by the slightly dated aesthetics of the brand, is what pushed me to re-brand - as well as personal improvements in my design capabilities.
Killing the Creature
It was an extremely difficult choice to make, I didn't want to get rid of the ploctopus as it had become synonymous with Wilkinson Graphic Design and the entire ethos of the brand (and not to mention, I had become somewhat emotionally attached to it). But I figured that it had served its purpose and maybe it was time to retire it as it couldn't follow where I planned on taking the brand. The ploctopus will always stand as part of the defining of my freelance career and the ethos I take when tackling design projects. Who knows, maybe one day I'll come back to the ploctopus somehow.
Back to Square One
Here we are again, thinking about what Wilkinson Graphic Design should look, feel and sound like. Largely, the ethos hasn't changed but the positioning has, I'm not aiming to increase my freelance client pool to the scale of before so therefore not looking to overcomplicate things with services and business talk. Instead I'm looking to take more of a portfolio approach to the brand, more of a celebration of how far I've come and the work that has got me here. The overriding feeling was to produce something of a simplistic nature which gets across confidence in the work I've produced and be less about the brand and more about the work I have produced over the years. This presented the challenge of creating a strong brand, that wasn't so strong that it would overpower the work being presented.
To approach this challenge I opted to keep things simple with flat design, I toyed around with gradients and vector illustrations but started to feel this was getting over complicated in a similar fashion to the ploctopus brand. The flat design allowed me to keep things simple and focus on colour as a leading visual of the branding. I created a colour pallet that was soft yet vibrant and wouldn't conflict with portfolio pieces. This colour pallet, when used correctly lends itself to simple isometric icons, something that I have been experimenting with recently and love the aesthetic of. I wanted to incorporate this isometric design into the brand somehow, without over saturating it with 3D looking elements, as this could distract away from the core brand. When used sparingly, these icons are nice accompaniments to spreads with a lot of white space and add a bit of character.
What I have aimed to do is give myself enough breathing room with this brand to expand on down the line. This will help me avoid the pitfall of becoming out-of-style or irrelevant as I did before. I have created a solid foundation which can be adapted and moulded into what I need it to be, but there is enough here to create clean, professional outcomes with these core elements.
I'm really looking forward to seeing where this brand can go, thinking about how it can expand on the iconography, how it can incorporate photography, how I can involve bespoke typography (all the ographies). So watch this space and watch the Wilkinson Graphic Design develop and evolve, and keep an eye out as the ploctpus might make a return...
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