Fall 2023
Overview
During this stage of the broader branding project, we were challenged to design a business card, letterhead, and envelope which would later be placed within our brand's entire stationary kit. Out of the entire kit, the business card contains the most information at the smallest scale. Because of this, we started designing the business card before everything else. The business card is a standard 3.5in x 2 in size, the envelope is based on a standard #10 envelope, and the letterhead is a standard 8.5in x 11in. I changed my brand colors during the business card portion of this stage.
Research + Brainstorming
During my research, I tried to find a lot of examples of full corporate stationary sets, and I was lucky to have found a few that were actually geared towards science museums. Most business cards were two-sided, which allowed the companies to either have the logo on its own on one side with all of the information on the other, or full graphics and illustrations on the back of the card with the logo and information on the other. I was a little worried about the challenge our project would pose since we were only creating a single-sided logo. Fitting everything I wanted onto one side was daunting. After my research, I found that I really liked the idea of integrating a background tint into my business card that could be carried over into the rest of my stationery. Most of the examples I found took this approach and ended up looking very cohesive. I felt a little overwhelmed trying to think of business card ideas that would also work across all future collateral.
Sketches + Doodles
I want to preface this by apologizing for the sad state of my sketch paper - I had spilled water on my notebook while drawing these. During my sketches, I tried to keep things simple for the time being, only really paying attention to general logo and text placements rather than any extra design elements. I slowly realized that my chosen company could prove difficult given the long website and email names. During my sketches, I tried writing out a few different options of stacking orders for my card information to see what worked best.
Thumbnails
When I moved on to my tight thumbnails, I realized just how difficult a vertical orientation could be given the website and email length. This was frustrating because a vertical orientation would allow me to make my logo bigger on the card. During feedback, it was recommended that I just scrap the vertical layouts and try a couple more horizontal orientations. This stage was already time-consuming given the complexity of my logo, leaving me to regret ever designing something so detailed in the first place. I did end up with a better idea of how I would place a tint into my chosen design at this stage.
Intermediate Compositions
Despite the vertical orientation struggles, I still wanted to try my hand at a tighter hand composition because I liked the idea of having a larger logo on the card, one that I just wouldn't be able to draw as big within the horizontal orientation. I wish I had drawn these tighter looking at them now, but during this stage, I was able to really envision a cleaner card with the tints.
Final Hand CompositionS
I decided to just go with the horizontal orientation for my final tight hand comp. I really liked the stacking order of the information, and I was pretty excited about the background tint graphics. My only concern at this stage was readability given the atom behind all of the text.
Black + White Computer Progressions
I was pretty excited once I got my design into the computer, and I went through many variations of the business card, making small changes each time. I played around with different text weights, colors, and leading as well as messing with the tints and the two bars at the bottom of the card. Eventually, I switched the logo placement entirely so that it was in the bottom right of the card and I ended up liking this better. I realized at this stage that "youngmindsexploratorium.com" almost read as "sexploratorium," so I knew I had to adjust my kerning a bit. Additionally, I had some ink bleed within my logo when printed that made the color blocks within the magnet 'U' and on top of the 'i' in "Young Minds" blur together. I ended up going back to my original logo to increase the spacing between the letter blocks and the characters so that the ink bleed issue wouldn't be as bad. Instead of having two rectangle blocks at the bottom of the card, I thought it could be cool to place one of the circuit arms near the bottom of the card to form a sort of border rather than a simple rectangle.
Color Studies + Applications
I went through a ton of business card color studies initially. I was having such a hard time figuring out a good placement of the tinted graphics. Turns out this wouldn't matter anyway because I redid the entire business card after introducing the new branding colors and then one final time when revising everything at the end of the term.
Final 2 Spot Color Stationary Set
