Personal Brand DNA

This is my personal brand. I call it the Catshroom.

The cat is to represent my pampered, lazy, feisty side.
The mushroom is to represent my rigid, nocturnal side with my short-lived attention span.
It has a mysterious and mischievous expression. I like to trick and scare people.
The spirals just add to the sleek, twisted appearance. I'm a fan of spirals.
I like the colour mint green, in which I coloured the spots. The pink just happened to match it. Overall, the bright colours give it a more vibrant, cheerful yet poisonous look.

"I am approachable even though I look scary. I can be really nice, but don't take me for granted :)"

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This is the logo I designed for the CAAS project.

Let me copy-paste the rationale from my brand proposal...


Rationale
The logo showcases the past, present, and future of Singapore’s aviation using the silhouette of planes. The topmost plane is the ‘past’ plane, modelled after the 1940s airplanes. The bottommost plane is the ‘present’ plane, and the middle plane is the ‘future’ plane, with its shape inspired by the Stealth plane, one of man’s latest inventions, which I slightly altered to look like an arrow head to show how Singapore aviation is moving forward. The colours used from the past, present and future planes are earthy colours to represent the country soil, Singapore being “A little red dot”, and potential. The colours get brighter to show that the Singapore aviation has a bright future ahead. The lines trailing behind the planes help to shape the island of Singapore. The overall shape of the lines and the planes were inspired by the USB symbol, to represent connectivity. Following the feedback given, I have increased the sizes of the planes so that the shapes can still be made out when the logo is minimized. The text “100 Aviation Years Singapore” is to show viewers that we are celebrating 100 years of aviation in Singapore, along with “Since 1911” to show when Singapore’s aviation history started. The tagline “Connecting. Shaping. Advancing.” is to help viewers break down the elements of the logo to see: the tweaked USB symbol - which also shows how the Singapore aviation helps to connect people around the world, the outline of the shape of the island of Singapore - which also shows that the Singapore aviation is the country’s foundation and pride and the celebration is nation-wide, and also the evolution of the plane models - which shows the advancement of Singapore’s aviation industry. Following the feedback, I added the words “Since 1911” into the logo. I used a sans serif font for the “100 Aviation Years Singapore Since 1911” and the tagline which is rigid and therefore shows stability. Following the feedback to make the tagline font more matching with the font used in the woodmark, the font for the tagline is also sans serif instead of the previous script, angled to the direction of the planes to emphasize on the aviation ‘moving forward’. The specific fonts I chose also match the symbolmark in a way that there are many horizontal lines and barely any curves. Overall, the logo looks futuristic.

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Comparing a personal brand and a corporate brand like above, a personal brand is more flexible because a personal brand is, well, personal. You can use any colour you want, anything you want, because its only purpose is to represent the human you are. Anyone can judge your brand, but it doesn't matter.

A corporate brand on the other hand, must have qualities that attract most people and tell about how good the company is. Every element of the brand should make the company look good, as I've bolded in the rationale above. This is because the company wants to be respected and wants people to support it, to purchase products or services from it, to be a walking advertisement for it so more people would be supporting it, they need to make money. In short, anyone can judge the brand, but this time it matters.

A few similarities though, is that every element of a brand identity has a reason for being a part of it, even in a personal brand where anything and everything can happen. I designed my brand that way because I think that's what fits me.

Brands should always look visually appealing. It's of number one importance to me because if your brand is able to grab people's attention in one glance, then people will actually bother to find out what your brand is all about. I tend to use contrasting colours so my designs stand out more. I also tend to use simple shapes that are easy to recognize. I like vector style art.