Shanimal Creative by Shanimal Creative

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CLIENT

A graph­ic design­er and illus­tra­tor liv­ing in Lex­ing­ton, KY, search­ing for more free­lance work and a step up from his just-out-of-school, in-house design job.

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BRIEF

My goal was to mar­ket myself to oth­er cre­atives and devel­op some­thing that could be fun while show­ing a lit­tle per­son­al­i­ty dur­ing net­work­ing sit­u­a­tions. My career inter­ests fall main­ly into illus­tra­tion, typog­ra­phy, and iden­ti­ty design so I want­ed to (a) prac­tice that and (b) try to show some com­pe­ten­cy in those areas while end­ing up with some­thing that I myself could remain inter­est­ed in for a healthy amount of time.

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APPROACH

I devel­oped a dynam­ic sys­tem of char­ac­ters with­in a word­mark. The approach leaves me a lot of room to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent faces and illus­tra­tions and has been a lot of fun to imple­ment. I matched the col­or to a com­mon red Sharpie so that I can get any pieces print­ed blank, with­out the face, and can actu­al­ly hand-draw the char­ac­ters as need­ed. Hope­ful­ly peo­ple notice that and get a kick out of it but if all it does is keep it fresh and new for me, it’s worth it.

The response has been really positive so far. It’s been fun to see people react as I hand out business cards at happy hour events or meet-and-greets. It seems like it makes an impression. It’s also given me a fun little mascot to rally behind and show off my work—I’m not typically a strong self-promoter. — Shannon Adams, Designer