When I relaunched And Possibly Dinosaurs this week, I launched a brand-new service: Custom Brand Design by And Possibly Dinosaurs!
To give you an idea of what the process will look like, I’m outlining the new branding for And Possibly Dinosaurs. You can expect a very similar process if you hire me to redesign your brand!
First, I wanted to bring in my new focus and slogan: Love your job. Love your blog. Before my slogan was “blogging, design, and feminism in bite-sized pieces,” which served me well then, but I was ready for a change.
I also wanted the new brand to be a better reflection of who I am as a person. The old colors were very bright, and the fonts were loud and in your face. However, if you look around my house and in my wardrobe, I gravitate toward muted colors and neutrals. There was a disconnect between me as a person and my brand, and I wanted to close that gap.
And finally, I wanted my audience to be comfortable when they came to my site. I wanted to have easy-to-understand and easy-to-read graphics, and I wanted the whole experience to be calming. The content I write about (tech tutorials, mostly) can be quite stressful, so bright colors can aggravate that. I don’t want my audience to be even more stressed than they already are!
With all of that in mind, here’s the branding that I came up with:
The colors are much lighter and calmer, and the script font is cleaner than before. However, the dinosaur and logo setup are the exact same, which makes a connection to my previous brand and helps people who were familiar with the old brand make the connection to the new one.
So how did I get here? I started on Pinterest, pinning a ton of inspiration to a secret board. Then I created a mood board:
As you can see, the colors are much lighter and softer than I had before. I gravitate toward pink (my wedding dress was pink, guys), so I knew that would be my primary color.
I also wanted my Instagram accounts (both personal and blog-related) to be full of pictures that I love, while still matching my new brand, so I included some of my own pictures in my mood board as well! (Yes, that is my dog, his name is Stanley, and you can follow him on Instagram at @omgastick.)
From there, I played around with color and typography combinations until I came up with this:
I like to think of it as the cleaned-up, adult version of my former teenage logo!
The full, primary logo features my new slogan so you can get an idea of my content just from the logo. However, it can get too small to read rather quickly, so I needed a secondary logo that works in smaller spaces, like the top of my website:
It’s the same exact logo, without the dinosaur and the slogan. It easily matches the rest of my branding, while being easier to read in smaller spaces!
And finally, I knew I wanted to bring a graphic element into my blog (I do write about graphic design, after all), so I put together a big library of icons for me to use on buttons, throughout blog posts, and more! Here’s a small preview:
They go along with the color coordination I utilize on my site (pink for design, blue for blogging, green for career, light pink for lifestyle, dark grey for behind the scenes), but I’m able to easily change up the colors as needed.
I’ve got icons for so many topics that I’ll probably never need to create a new one again! But if I do, they’re all really similar, and whipping up a new one will take me no time at all.
So there you have it: the new And Possibly Dinosaurs branding! I’m really happy with how everything came together. It’s clean, it feels like me, and it creates a calming atmosphere to learn about a not-so-calming topic.
Interested in working with me on a new brand for your blog or business? Check out what’s included in the package and fill out the inquiry form to get started!
