The process of creating a new identity is always challenging, especially if the subject is yourself! It would be so nice to have the time and resources to step off the treadmill and spend a couple of weeks, with no other distractions, just concentrating on creating a new face to show the world.
Sadly, this is the real world, and that’s just not possible.
For me, the start of this process has been this blog, and I’m having to fit working on this around my other duties that are actually paying the bills. Using WordPress and a theme called Suffusion, I’m gradually moulding it into shape, like a sculptor adding a little extra clay here, or taking away a blob there, until I’m happy that the end result is a reasonably accurate self-portrait.
One of the features that Suffusion offers is to add your own ‘favicon’. If you’ve no idea what that is, it’s the tiny square logo that appears next to the website URL in the address bar at the top of your browser window and, more importantly, next to the name of the website in your bookmarks list. In essence, it gives your website a brand.
Now, making a favicon turns out to be something of a challenge, because their standard size is a mere 16 x 16 pixels! That’s less than a quarter of an inch — 6.25mm — square! Many designs that look great at a larger size simply disappear when shrunk to this size . As far as I was concerned, this led me to settle upon the simplest of logos for my own branding: the sans-serif HH on a plain black background that you should be able to see here 
.
If you fancy creating a favicon for your own website or blog, then you can use Photoshop as I did (here’s some good advice and a link to download the plugin) or one of the many online favicon creation pages, such as this one.
So, having created this little square icon, I can immediately see where I want to take it for my full logo, because it already bears a strong resemblance to the logo for my dormant graphic and web design business, Gladius (shown here on the left). The Gladius name was born in a brainstorm about ten years ago and has served me well enough, but I’m now gathering all my talents under one name and one brand — and that brand is Henry Hyde, pure and simple! But I loved the logo when I first designed it and I still love it now, so I’m going to stick with the visual elements that made it effective and keep the “Creative Communication” strapline because that is, in fact, what my business is all about: visual, verbal and written communication, whatever the context.
From a typographical perspective, Gladius was all curves. The “G” and “GLADIUS” were rendered using a wonderful typeface called Trajan, which features beautiful, classical forms that would suit being carved into marble as much as being printed on paper. Trajan also forms a nice counterpoint to the “CREATIVE COMMUNICATION” which is set in that most stylish of sans-serif faces, Gill Sans.
In order to achieve absolute clarity in the favicon I just created, however, the “HH” had to be rendered as a sans-serif duo and, in fact, as you can see from the next image, I simply created a couple of utterly simple characters using the pencil tool in Photoshop, with uprights and crossbars one pixel wide. I tried a number of other options using both serif and sans-serif fonts, but none of them did the job of conveying my initials with the directness of what you see here. I also tried different colours, including white and red, but the pale grey worked best, with none of the blurring that seemed to occur when using either the stark contrast of white on black or the strong red. It’s also slightly fortuitous because, for print purposes, my Gladius identity used a metallic gunmetal silver ink (Pantone 8201), so I’ll probably use it again.
My next task is to adapt this design for use in print and in forms larger than a favicon on the web. Whilst I shall keep the shapes and proportions essentially the same, I want to try out some subtle tweaks to ensure clarity at all the sizes the logo is likely to be used on paper, whether that be business cards, brochures, letterheads, ads or even a trade stand.
That will be the subject of my next post in the ‘Graphic Design > Identity’ category.
