Purple Words
On A Gray Background
— Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. “Cowgirl in the Sand” (1969)
February 2014
Dane Aleksander – Logomark
Designed by Dane Aleksander with Adobe Illustrator.
Hello world. My name is Dane. I love visual design. I love visual effects. I also love wildlife and wildlife art. My studio work aims to advance visual storytelling of the wild places and the animals that live in them. And I apply this practice to help create images for stories imagined by people like you.
Dane Aleksander – Logomark: Rainbow, Purple, Pink, Orange, Yellow (2014)
In my first two months as an independent artist, I designed a visual identity for my graphic art services, which included a redesigned folio website to facilitate gateways for freelance art commissions. Having this framework to showcase art commissions that I am proud to selflessly self-promote has become an imperative. Since I started developing this folio website in 2011, I have become more aware of the user experience—the ideology of functional, intuitive design. I have better understood how code, type and images react across form factors like desktops, laptops, tablets and phones and so on. I have seen features that once amused my sense of design later complicate the interaction. This redesign was likewise a shift in focus from a collection of art projects to a structured showcase of graphic art services. There is a graphic art folio. There is another for visual effects art for apps, games and cinematics. There is another for more traditional art commissions such as poster and book illustration. And there is a purple homepage for my bio about art and design, and elephants.
The logomark is a prism of warm colors. The shape of the mark is an equilateral triangle, with an orientation set to reference a “play” media button. The shape is comprised of four colored smaller-and-equally-sized equilateral triangles. Each color has a part to play. The purple colored triangle is centered and pointed in the alternate direction. The purple colored triangle represents me and my place in the art world. The stand-alone purple logomark is inversed to display as an argyle-like pattern. A pink, an orange and a yellow colored triangle – with sequentionally reduced saturation – relate to three areas of my work: visual design, visual effects (or animation), and visual art (or illustration). These three are symbolized by a graphic pen for design, a play button for animation, and a desk light for illustration.
This visual identity is manifested in a website design, with an art folio for each select service. The website continues to be designed and developed with the WordPress information architecture, and has branched off a custom WordPress theme: Rainbow Unicorn, based on the Twenty Thirteen theme by Automattic—the WordPress team.
Dane Aleksander – Logomark sketch (graphic pencil, 2014)
Client Team
Dane Aleksander.
Iconography
An argyle pattern, a graphic pen, a play button, a desk light.
Typography
Default: Oswald (2011) principally by Vernon Adams.
Website
Folio Website: danealeksander.github.io.