Like any designer, I’m hardly ever satisfied with the work I do for myself. Literally, I am my own worst client!

Finishing up my tenure as Sosauce’s Creative Director, I sat down and evaluated my own personal collateral and design stack to measure how effectively I had been designing for myself, see my 2009 design. Though, I was quite happy with the concept and colors around my previous design, I felt that the overall identity did not represent my best skills and decisions as a designer who is researched, calculated and flexible. Furthermore, the site design could not be positively reflected through my print collateral (business cards, resume), which I saw as a major problem!

After several long weeks trying to pull out the short strands of shaved hair on my head, I sat down and developed a visual identity. I tend to rely on modern, minimalistic sans-serif fonts &emdash; of which, Helvetica Neue is my absolute favorite), but accept that such typefaces rarely make an impact on identity design. I’ve always been attracted to block-serif and modern-serif typefaces, but never really found a typeface that spoke to and of me, until I found Nilland on dafont! The typeface immediately gelled with me and has quickly become a favorite! With some nudging and illustrator vector work, I had developed a typeface logo treatment I feel is understated, but eyecatching!

I then spent a wealth of time exploring the message I wanted to send to potential freelance clients and companies (err, other designers) who would heavily evaluate my work. Personally, I love dark, bold colors, but accept that presenting a great cache of information through text on a dark background can be a bit tedious for readers. I also stuck with my love for simple, slab-serifs and employed a condensed HelveticaNeue as my copy typeface. The result is what jefflagasca.com is right now, and finally, I am completely satisfied with the design I have developed for myself!

• date: April 27 2010
• client: myself
• website: http://www.jefflagasca.com/