When it comes to personal branding, I want to make sure that how I present myself to clients is unequivocally me. What about my brand describes who I am? What can you infer just by taking one look at my designs? What do I prefer in terms of design? These are questions that I have been trying to answer for a little over a year now, and it's likely that this page in particular will continue to go through changes.
For now, I would like to introduce the start of rebranding myself as IceKitsune Studios.
Where We Started
In 2023, as a junior at Eastern Kentucky University, we were give the project of designing our own personal branding, so that we could begin to find our place in the design world. Such a task was... daunting to say the least. For so long, we've been doing projects based on clients, now we have to design something for ourselves!? Utter crazy! Well, like it or not, this project was a necessity, so it was time to get to work. I knew when I first start designing that I wanted my brand to be related to snow, foxes, and cool colors, these were all things that I like after all. But as I was designing, something about it didn't feel right. The branding, which was just called Frosted Studios at the time, didn't feel like me. But I couldn't just keep changing it, so I apprehensively turned in the finished work and called it good for now.
Fast Forward 2024: Round 2
One year later, and the last semester of senior year has begun. Everyone is stoked about sharing what they have learned and the projects that they plan to showcase at the senior exhibit. My brain was immediately in storytelling and graphic novel mode. However, there was something very important we had to do, and that was cleaning up our branding. We were very fortunate to have a fresh pair of eyes looking at our branding for the first time and giving us advice that would benefit us. It was my professor's reassure that gave me the confidence I needed to start tackling the hefty task known as Frosted Studios. I realized that I really liked what the wordmark looked like and it was the illustration that was bothering me. With that in mind, I cleaned up my logo for something that felt more like me, though... it still wasn't quite there yet.
Post Graduation: Round 3
With a Bachelor's in Fine Art under my belt, I could finally take a deep breath and bask in the accomplishment of completely college with Latin Honor. As months passed and I worked on continuing to develop my graphic novel, I began to realize what was missing with my branding. The characterization of it. Deep to my core, I am a storyteller with dreams of helping clients to bring their tales to life through illustration and animation. While, I do have other interests in design, like UX/UI and designing print collateral, the piece I was missing was having character and a name that held sentimental value to me. All it took was looking at my art Instagram: IceKitsuneSpirit, to figure out that I wanted to rename the branding to IceKitsune Studios and to take my mascot, Snowdrop, and shape her into a simpler design for the logo. My colors drastically changed to green, white, and pink, to give more of a winter feel like Snowdrop. The biggest change that I made was that this logo was going to be animated in After Effects. It took a lot of time to figure out the troubles, but in the end, I came out with a logo that truly feels like me that I can confidently say I am proud of.