I’ve been absent from this blog a lot. It’s always been an off and on thing for me. A nice creative outlet and I love it. But I’ve never really known what it should be. It’s kind of random focus and my imagined reader is myself and I think my content reflects that. I’ve gone back and forth about if I should treat this more like a business and “niche” down to more focused and related content. I’ve made peace with myself recently about a lot of things and found that where I am in life right now just doesn’t allow me to make this a business. Holding out for that business possibility holds me back from sharing myself here. I tell you all this because while I have done a lot of creative projects and created some new recipes lately, it’s so hard to put them together in a post. Right now I’m going to school and working full time, plus I am a mom and wife. I still make time for my creative outlets but because of this nagging self voice I have in the back of my mind I feel like I must share it all here or do nothing. I still hope to share it all and have a growing folder of “to blog” photos that I want to share so badly. It’s just not realistic so if I have any consistent readers out there and this content I’m about to share doesn’t interest you, I understand. My focus lately has been on design and creative growth professionally and academically. It’s got me thinking about how to brand and market myself and my work and where I really want to be professionally in the future. That brings me to share my latest side gig of a Salt City Coachworks Branding and Logo project.
I’m playing with ideas on how to best display this information and build a better portfolio of my work and bring it to life a little more than a flat image. Salt City Coachworks is a collision repair and restoration business in Salt Lake City, Utah. While researching and working through my process to approach this project, I drew inspiration from a vintage auto shop.
I developed two looks that would allow Salt City Coachworks to utilize the design for a wide variety of needs in the future.
A new part of my process is mocking up this imagery for clients. I’ve done this before if they asked or were specifically in the market to purchase a sign or tshirt and the mock up would serve for ordering purposes but thinking about how I feel like it is my responsibility to bring my vision to life and help clients really see the vision I have, why not add it to some items and show them.
My full time job requires a lot of dynamic content creation. I work a lot on videos and gifs which has been fun. The department I work for is IT so the subject seems very similar in a lot of my work so it’s nice to apply some of those skills to things outside of that. Plus I just love gifs. There is a lot of debate on if it is pronounced “jif” or “gif” but I just love that it plays the animation and I like playing around with ideas on it.
These are other “mood” images I used when I approached this project. I’ve never been in an auto shop, well besides the lobby so I wanted to keep these things in the forefront of my mind as I went through my creative process.
What do you think about displaying projects like this? Does it help you better visualize how a brand can be used, rather than just the black and white lettering in the logo?
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