I found it challenging to start my Portfolio Show logo because of the “meta” nature of the project– it’s a design about design!
When I think about “design” in the most classic form, I think of Art Deco. So as a starting point, I watched this documentary about Art Deco fonts and advertising:
I also made a Pinterest board of Art Deco and Bauhaus design inspirations.
Then, I looked at contemporary fonts with an Art Deco flavor, screenshotted the ones I liked, and categorized them into a few digital collages. Here’s one of them:
At first, I was drawn to the Fairwater Deco font, so I played around with an idea to embellish it:
I liked the themes of Art Deco, contrasting geometric lines with more organic lines, and the motif of leaves. However, I felt that this design was not legible or clear enough. I decided to use a different font — one that has both capital and lower case letters and more versatility over all. I liked that the Charcuterie font had a retro look and lines of shading, similar to Fairwater Deco, but more legible:
I felt like this was missing the leafy, organic design aspects of the last one, however. I decided to add that back in by using the Adorn Ornaments font:
The Adorn Ornaments font also had a bird in it, and I added it in as both an homage to some of my previous work and a reference to the Portlandia sketch “Put a Bird on It!”
I’ve used a birds in several previous designs. One time was when I designed the invitations for my brother’s wedding, which was in Yerevan, Armenia. Him and his wife gave people in the US very little notice about their destination wedding and only sent out simple e-mails to the family. My parents immediately realized that no one in the extended family was taking this seriously due to the presentation of the invites, so I designed a wedding webpage on Squarespace and an invitation with an image of the Huma Bird from Persian mythology in it. At the time I lived in Brooklyn, so I went to the Persian section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to get ideas (my sister-in-law is from Iran). As soon as I sent out the custom-designed invitations, people on the American side of the wedding couldn’t resist booking trips to Armenia!
When my sister-in-law announced that my nephew was on the way in 2021, she did it by mailing out a quail egg stuffed with glitter and a note that said, “a little birdie came to say… we have a baby on the way!”
In 2022, I designed the birth announcements for my nephew and included an illustration of a chickadee. My extended family lives all over the place, with some people as far away as Alaska and Germany. My parents are from opposite sides of the country originally. My sister-in-law’s family is mostly in Iran, but even they’ve become scattered as people leave the country. Most of us aren’t on social media together for various reasons. The birth announcements that were mailed out were important because of all the complicated logistics of communicating between everyone.
In 2023, I was thrown in on the deep end of doing a logo re-design in a strange and stressful situation (that’s a long story for another post), and I chose to make it a phoenix to represent rebirth and freedom.
The bird actually fit the theme of a graduation and new phase of life on the Portfolio Show logo, though. It could be seen as a symbol of freedom and the unknown — a bird leaving the nest to explore the world and make its own way.
It needed more emphasis, while “2025” needed less emphasis (we all know it’s 2025!)
This looked perfect to me– it’s a blend of classic influences that I love like Art Deco and traditional calligraphy and contemporary, streamlined aesthetics. I like the way it almost has a hexagonal shape to it. It balances geometric lines with organic, flowing ones.
Even though the bird started out as a joke, it really worked for this design!