Black + White: Creating a Brand
After months upon months of stalling, I’ve finally decided that now is the time to relaunch my blog. Formerly hosted at mattpat.net (which now redirects here), the new blog @ blog.mattpatenaude.com, entitled “Short Thoughts” (it’s a pun, get it?), will be my personal outlet for thoughts, feelings, and the wacky and crazy stuff I find that makes the Internet great.
I designed the blog from scratch, drawing on inspiration from my portfolio, which was designed by my dear friend and brilliant artist Laurent Baumann. It takes advantage of a couple of shmexy CSS 3 innovations (like media queries), and represents the final realization of my completed “MP” brand. In honor of the new blog, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my vision for the brand in general. 
If you’ve ever talked with me via iChat, or else you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen this image before:
It’s the avatar I’ve been using for the past few months. It too was designed by Laurent when he did the design for my portfolio, and I’m absolutely in love with it. The problem arose when I had to use a logo on an invoice about a month back — it didn’t look quite right. I decided to take out the dark background and turn off the glow, and just use the flat stylized “MP” on white in the corner. It looked terrific.
Just the other day, I decided it was finally time to make myself some business cards. I loved how the MP logo looked on the black striped background, but I also liked the elegance that came from its use on white on the invoices, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to do when I designed the cards. Then it hit me.
Yes, crazy as it might sound, I discovered that I could use both. Black on back, white on front. And just like that, a dual black + white brand materialized.
I liked my logo, but I felt like something was missing from it being complete and “fully professional,” if you know what I mean, and that was the two different settings in which it can be used. In this way, my portfolio (black) and blog (white) serve as kind of a yin and yang: both of them are me, but they represent two different sides of my personality.
Overanalysis? Quite possibly, but come on, just because the blog is new doesn’t mean everything has to change. 
Comments
Matt Ruiz said…
Beautiful Design, Matt!
Moitah said…
Nice introductory post, I love the card !
Keep it up
Hammer said…
Less blogging, more updating Bowtie to fix the memory leaks on SL.
Matt Patenaude said…
@Hammer I’ll actually be posting an update via @13bold on Twitter within the next couple of days, I’m going to take a stab at some release dates.
Joseph McLaughlin said…
Nice job Matt! I like the cards!
@Hammer, totally out of line. Bowtie (and Bluebird for that matter) are given away for free. If you’d like Matt to speed up his development, how about organizing the community to donate enough money to add up to a decent salary for his work on the project?
Anyway, I digress. I’m subscribed Matt, hope to see some cool stuff!
Resident Machiavel said…
You are over-analyzing, but that’s perfectly fine if it means that much to you. I like the logo because it’s no frills and gets right to the point, and it’s memorable and can work on any background. And as the resident Machiavel, you don’t have a dark side to you, just so you know, but the card still serves it’s purpose. And even if you did have the dark side buried, bad strategy to telegraph it…that’s my 2 cents…
Me said…
Just ftr….most of the people using your products/reading your blog have never met you. So they will not understand why “Short Thoughts” is a pun. I’m just sayin…
Short Thoughts: New Business Cards said…
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