A Brand Called Colin Paul Murphy

Swimming, Sneakers, Menus, Beards, Viewfinders, 3-D Glasses, Shaky Hands, Martha Stewart, Glasses, Hybrids and Speech Bubbles.

These are all of the concepts I considered deeply when branding myself.
And I forgot to mention peanut butter and jelly.

My problem, was my ignorance.

I hear of these stories of people making incredible impacts on recruiters and CD's by showing their portfolio in AMAZING ways. A binder made of plastic bags, a portfolio shown on napkins, and all of the fixin's.

One awesome story I read in Luke Sullivan's Book "Hey Whipple Squeeze This". A kid put all of his work into a wallet made a fake license with the CEO's name on it and dropped it in the bathroom of the building where the agency was located. Then yadda, yadda, yadda, the kid got a job and Luke Sullivan is writing about him.

I went to bed that night concocting this brilliant scheme that I can put together, like the wallet, to get a job and eventually make millions, win 20 gold medals and be the president of the universe.

Well let's just say I'm still working on the job part.

I came back down to reality last semester when I told my professor all of my extravagant ideas of how I'm going to make a menu out of my portfolio and have all this interesting, food diction in my ad descriptions and blah, blah, blah.

My professor looked at my work with a reaction that I was not looking for. Content.
No remarks of pure genius, or singing from the heavens or kissing of my feet. Nothing.

That's when I realized, back to the sketchbook for me. So I slowly made more ideas come together. Ones that would express my humor and personality, ones that showed physical characteristics unique to me, ones that I loved and ones that I hated. I juiced it till there was only rhine.

Recently I came up with two ideas. Both were nothing special but showed some of the few things I wanted.
One was based around my glasses and one was based around my working style.

In the first concept I wanted to brand my glasses. I knew that this wasn't original, actually it is probably number 3 on most common things to make a personal logo out of next to animals and faces. But I thought of a great line that made it unique,
four eyes are better than two.
It gave off my style of advertising and writing; it said "I'm confident"; it said fuck you world make room for the bees knees.
But it didn't say who the hell is Colin Murphy. It just said I wear glasses.

So my second idea. One that has been the base of all of my concepts from start to finish: I am an idea man. Again not original. But it is something I'm standing by throughout this job process. I'm not the greatest Art Director and I'm not the greatest Copywriter. I'm a Thinker that can do both. When I was applying for internships they always told me to choose one, Art Director or Copywriter.

So from now on with this branding I will give agencies the honest truth. I'm a hybrid of both. I can write great copy and form a great design to boot. My professors have said that the industry is changing because the line between art director and copywriter is beginning to blur. To me, I am that line.

Here is my first attempt logo design: