From: When You Should Design "Badly" On Purpose

UX content strategist Jerry Chao suggests that purposely designing badly can be a great tactic for conquering creative block:

"For starters, you’re exercising your design muscles a lot more than just staring at a blank screen: designing badly is better than not designing at all. On a deeper level, designing a purposefully bad mockup forces you to think critically on the same topics, but from a different perspective. If you can figure out the worst place to stick a call-to-action, for example, that will shed some light on the best place. This kind of productive distraction allows you to think about solutions without actually thinking about them."

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This article was something that although I have though about before I have never really tried. I was always taught that you should just put all your ideas on paper (or computer) and that by just letting go and allowing yourself to be create you will be creative. This method of thinking seems to be similar to what Jerry Chao is suggesting in this article. If you create bad design something great might stem from it and you might create something amazing. 

Being a designer, I get a creative block a lot. I think most designers do. The pressure to make something amazing takes time and there are steps that go into it. By focusing on the steps and allowing yourself to create bad designs is all part of the process to creating something great. If you are able to think differently and see things in a new way you will be able to think of some really neat and fun new designs. 

Looking at a blank screen not only doesn't get you anyway it make you anxious and makes you feel like you literally hit a dead end. By at least designing and working through the design problem you are working and allowing yourself to make stuff that sucks to get to the solution and to create something amazing. 

Keep plugging through fellow designers! By plugging through and working through problems great designs are born.

Here is a sneak peak at some design comps for my personal brand:

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From: Build Your Own Brand: Designing Your Personal Brand

Dr. Steven Doloff, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt, advises:

“A brand is either a semiotic vehicle or a destination. If it’s a vehicle, it’s designed to visually and/or verbally direct your audience to some generally positive idea, feeling, or attitude with which you want to be associated. (Think Sunshine Bakers.) If it’s a destination, it’s designed to make your audience formulate for themselves your virtues by experiencing your product or service. (Think Smuckers Jam.) So in choosing a personal brand, ask yourself this question: Do you initially want to project a positive association, or do you want to create a mystery?”

If you design a personal logo that is a recognizable image, for example, a star, tree or lion, you are creating a vehicle. If you design a logotype of your name or a nonrepresentational image, you are creating a destination.

It’s essential to codify your personal brand. As Dany Lennon, President, The Creative Register Inc., advises,

“Know what ‘your’ brand is. The majority of people do not. When asked, they repeat what they feel, or what they have done. But brand identity is a lot more complex than what you feel or have done; it is in fact how you think! You own that.

Then, how you project what you are thinking. You own that too. Now define it with clarity and simplicity so everyone else can hear and understand what you are thinking and have something to truly believe in.”

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This piece from Build Your Own Brand:Designing Your Personal Brand was really interesting and relevant to my design right now. Right now I am working on branding myself as a designer and then that brand will help me hopefully get a job. This is probably one of the most challenging projects I have ever worked on because as a design, we are the pickiest. We want things to be perfect. Designers are known to be the pickiest of clients and if you are your own client good luck. It is challenging because there is no direction, no "right" answer. Your brand is YOUR brand it has to represent you. You want your brand to represent you and it's not something that you like or something that you've created before. Like in the article above, "brand identity is a lot more complex than what you feel or have done; it is in fact how you think! You own that." It is hard to create something based on how you think. Trust me, I am doing it now and it is hard. No one can give you ideas or advice because most likely that isn't going to create your brand. Right now its a bit of trial and error to get something that feels like me but hopefully soon it will all come together. Stay tuned for some final logo design! 

Here are some logo comps for my personal brand:

This week I worked on sketches for my brand. This was an interesting task as we had to try to encompass ourselves into small icons. My first step in coming up with some ideas was to get some inspiration. I realized I didn't have a logo design board in pinterest so I quickly made one and started pinning lots of interesting logo designs. This helped me come up with ideas and a place to start. The logos started off very simple with my name written different ways, then I slowly added icons and by the end my name had turned into shapes. This process was really exciting and showed how much of a process you go through with just some simple sketches.

Click here for an instagram post I published today on my professional instagram account