So, I am a graphic designer and i’ve been working for both a company and some freelance works for about 2/3 years (the freelance works i’ve been doing for a bit longer) and i always focused on the clients and their needs.
Now i’ve come to a point of my life where i want to find my identity as a graphic designer and create my own logo and brand to communicate myself. I know the process of defining my values, my target, etc. , i know what style i like and what i don’t like, so i started brainstorming and creating a logo.
What happens is that the next day… i feel like that logo doesn’t fit me anymore and i can do better… so i have another idea… and the next day the same thing happened, and the next, etc… It came to a point where i’m overwhelmed with ideas and all of them seem to fit my style and i don’t know what to do and choose, so i get stuck. (i’ve been stuck for basically a year with this, it’s enough.)
I’ve tried asking for opinion to close people, i’ve tried to start from the beginning all that thinking process to define my values and all…
I would like to know if this has happened to some of you and if someone knows how to actually overcome this situation to go forward… i’m starting to think i will never have a brand identity for myself and makes me feel unmotivated to work for others, if i can’t even work for myself.
Seems obvious you’re overthinking it. No one can really sort this out for you, but maybe it bears reminding…
The brand isn’t for you; it’s for your market. A logo may produce a certain aesthetic appeal that could drive a prospective client to choose you over another design resource, and that’s great when it happens, but when it does, it’s mostly just happenstance based on “taste”. You can’t design something that will make that same hit with every taste, so when, as a designer, you fall into the trap of designing for universal appeal, it almost always results in overreaching for something that’s desperately slick or gimmicked.
The real duty of your logo is to build an association with your quality output and over time, become an instrument of recognition. So the primary challenge is to make it simple and memorable. Many (or maybe most) of the marks that are considered “iconic” are also near-woefully mundane. It doesn’t have to be top-loaded with deep meaning about your values, mission, and style; it just has to be the kind of thing that is memorable to people who don’t even know what it is. “Oh, I’ve seen that before…” is like word-of-mouth squared. Forget all you’ve done up until now and start again blank, knowing all you need is something simple and distinct.
Thank you very much for your reply. You’re right, and you made me realize the big picture that I was already forgetting after hitting my head in this issue for so long, to be honest - the fact that I only need something memorable and associated with the quality that I provide. I have been mostly focused if a logo would reflect me as a person in general and that’s not what’s this about.
I got motivated to retry once again with a different mindset.
Thank you!
Been there, done that. Yup, it’s pretty common. I finally gave up and decided I would go logoless and stop pretending that some day I’d come up with something that was just right.
Can totally relate to your struggle here, have litterally been procrastinating for years about the perfect mark to represent “my brand.”
The conclusion I have come to (and maybe it’s through self-awareness or age), is that I’ll never be fully satisfied as my taste is constantly changing. It’s a horrible case of the “grass is always greener over there” or I would fall down a black hole trying to “refine” my design until it actually looked really bad.
My solution is pretty boring and it’s probably not for everyone, but I just picked a font that is timeless and not too fancy or quirky and wrote my business name in that.
Can totally relate to your struggle here, have litterally been procrastinating for years about the perfect mark to represent “my brand.”