Personal Brand
When creating my brand identity, I wanted it to be unique and clever. Then I made it more personal. I love to grow, especially as a designer, so the mark became a flower on a stem, with leaves cut out of a green block and a blue bloom on top.
Other explored concepts
I started by sketching with my initials. My first round of explorations played with the "C" in Claire, mirroring and curling it into spirals and building the shapes on circle grids so the curves felt deliberate. These early marks were bold and symmetrical and they used negative space to carve the forms out of solid shapes. They looked polished, but they felt abstract and impersonal, like they could belong to anyone.
Web design
No templates here! I coded this website from scratch using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Constraints
Most of my projects don't fit neatly into one category. A single client like UDCA or Mama Mirs Kitchen included branding, social media, and web design, so filing it under one label would hide most of the work. Splitting it into three separate projects wasn't right either, because the pieces only make sense together. I needed a way for visitors to find the kind of work they care about without losing the full story of each project.
One other thing to consider was the other projects I had that did not have a case study. Anything from Christmas Card illustrations to large paintings, I felt were still important to my portfolio. but wanted them to be seperate from the more thought-out case studies.
Solutions
I built the Gallery page around filter tabs (All, Brand, Web, and Social) so visitors can browse by discipline right away. Each case study then has its own sidebar that jumps to the sections inside it, such as the guidelines, social templates, and animations in my Re:Build project. That way someone looking for web design can go straight to it, and someone who wants the whole project can keep scrolling. Each project stays whole, and each discipline is still easy to reach.
To solve the issue with my non-case study work, I created a seperate page that can only be accessed through the gallery. This way, viewers could see it but it was not distracting of my more important work.
