Branding

Not just for steers

I’ve long admired designers. If I’d had a different nudge in high school (specifically, known it was even a field), I could see myself going into industrial design instead of architecture. One part of that admiration is the ability to distill a company, a team, a band, a product, an experience, whatever, down to an essence. How they can hoover up anything and everything about that thing that’s in front of them, and transmit it – zap – into your brain like a lightning bolt, a revelation, satori. From my writing days, it would hit like the perfect title for a story or a poem (but likely in a way that was more financially lucarative).

Design, of course, doesn’t always land like that, or doesn’t even always need that. Sometimes, it can just be cool. A cool way to package up what one wants to present for a curious audience. Portfolio sites are a prime example. One of the reasons to keep this site going for…15 years now (?!) is to provide that packaging for a curious someone, even if it’s only Future Me. Even clicking around my site from a decade and a half ago, I kept track of (and displayed, though the images have been lost to time) all different kinds of projects: writing, games, screen-printing, even tattoos. The curation part of portfolio, and its packaging, was often difficult for me. How could I capture the essence if my output was so diffuse?

In more recent iterations of this site, I’ve set aside those weird and sometimes wonderful outputs in favor of a more coherent narrative and focus: I write programs on computers to do things because I like to solve problems, make things, and scratch my own itch. Over the last couple of years, that’s been shifting more and more. Being able to rattle off reserved keywords, have Opinions on different ISA’s, or predict correctly which CSS rule is going to break in which browser have all become much less important signals of one’s capabilities as a software engineer. As we all reorient (again and again), it seems that what’s weird and sometimes wonderful could be valuable signal again. There wasn’t time, energy, or aptitude to apply this insight to portfolio design, though, not yet.

After the release of Claude Design, I decided to revisit this notion of the portfolio and the personal brand. What was it about me and the history of my conversations with Claude that was weird and (likely not ever, much less) sometimes wonderful?¹ I couldn’t ask directly and get a satisfactory answer with words, but about with design?

CB: Based on what you know about me and my aesthetics, let’s come up with a personal branding/design system for me. New capabilities dropped at https://claude.ai/design and it seems like yet another tool to get familiar with, if not good with.

Claude: So the system I want to pitch you isn’t “minimalist tech founder” or “maker-brutalist” — both feel ambient. I want to pitch newschematic as the whole-ass brand: a technical-drawing-meets-editorial system. Engineer’s eye, writer’s hand. What’s this branding system primarily serving right now?

CB: Blog and long-term personal brand (newschematic identity)

Claude: How much should it lean into the technical-drawing / schematic aesthetic vs. something warmer?

CB: Warmer – it’s important that this be beautiful. Very important.

Claude: What I landed on below borrows from old NASA publications and illuminated marginalia: a warm off-white ground, oxblood as the signal color, ink-black for type, a deep sepia as the supporting tone, and two accents (verdigris and goldleaf) used sparingly, like rubrication.

As a person who’s been using the Solarized theme in his editor for years and years, I was immmediately taken with the proposed design. And as of tonight, it’s made its way to this very blog. Does it represent me, though? Yes and no, in the best ways. “Yes,” in that it’s distinct and it came from a series of conversations and musing and wanderings and wonderings with me. But, “no,” in that there’s an elegance and sophistication in the design that isn’t totally and completely me, even as I look forward to growing in those directions.