Dancing with myself: creating a new brand for yesIsaid

I first branded my work under the DBA ‘yes.I.said’ (RIP to those delimiting periods), and built a website on Squarespace in 2014, which was then located at yesIsaid.com. At the time, yesIsaid was a side gig that had me working on mostly print and editorial design projects, and had dipped my toes into building rudimentary HTML/CSS sites using Dreamweaver and Squarespace for a few patient clients. My aesthetic at the time was focused on organic textures, references to analog print design techniques, incorporation of hand-made textures and forms, and a somewhat disdainful eschewal of the pragmatic aesthetic of the time. (In 2014-2015, Apple and Google were ushering us through glossy, antiseptic corridors on a dubious evolution from flat to material design, and growing consideration of UI/UX was pointing us toward a removal of any decoration and all evidence of inherent human imperfection.)

Over the course of the ensuing years, I have become a more skilled professional in every respect, and my clientele has shifted from mainly arty types and small businesses to a more diverse and higher-profile assortment of national and international businesses and organizations. I have expanded my skillset, and developed my own trade secrets and workflows, learning and honing my skills with every project. I have come to realize the error of imposing my own aesthetic onto client work, and have become more adept at quieting my own preferences in favor of establishing and adhering to each brand’s unique visual identity and form language.

In the face of all of this natural evolution, it has been becoming increasingly clear that I needed to update my own brand and marketing materials to better reflect the nature and the quality of the work I am doing today. So, at the beginning of 2025, I resolved to ‘hire’ myself to execute yesIsaid’s rebrand—despite my natural repulsion from doing any work on self-promotion. (This is a tendency shared by many whose work product is other people’s brands, and is related to the difficulty of navigating the blind spots and subjectivity inherent in marketing one’s own services.)

Rebranding myself: first considerations

There were a number of features of the yesIsaid brand (as it stood) that I either wanted to abandon or pursue over the course of the rebrand process:

Moodboard and inspiration

I found myself gravitating toward constructivist geometries, color schema related to vintage print (especially the Comico color grid in the moodboard below), and retro brand guidelines (NASA and the New York Transit Authority put out some great ones in their day). I liked the idea of creating a brand language that had the feel of a brand guidelines document, or the printer’s crop and registration marks and color bars.

These are some AI-generated concepts I summoned as part of the brainstorming phase, playing with the idea of using some version of the word ‘yes’ inside a speech bubble.

Logo design, first concepts

I spent the better part of two weeks iterating and fiddling with a bunch of different concepts, and ended up with a bunch of ideas that I liked. Each addressed continuity from the old logo in a different way. I was playing with the idea of displacing, obscuring, or truncating the letter forms. I arrived at lockups that treat ‘yesIsaid’ as a single block of letters, and demarcate the words with spatial transposition in lieu of spaces. A happy biproduct of this exploration was that lifting the ‘id’ of ‘said’ in order to slide the word ‘design’ below it effectively embedded the phrase ‘ID design’ (identity design) as a quieter entendre/easter egg within the logo form.

Second logo design concepts and color exploration

I had a good feeling about one of those designs so I went with it; it was simple, it played cleverly with rhythm and displacement, and worked well in one-line and stacked lockups. I just had to find the right configuration of lower- and uppercase letters paired with the perfect truncation of each letter. So, I spent another good while iterating on those variables. At the same time, I began to introduce different color palettes, trying to land on something that was colorful while leaving space for the colors of the work presented on this website.

3rd round: final form and color

I decided to push forward with the wordmarks you see below, and advanced five color schemes to this final round, in which I experimented with all usable color combinations within the palette, and creating mockups of designs for invoices, my client agreement, business cards, a t-shirt, and a website design. In the end, I decided on the color scheme you see on this website, with transposed renditions of red, green, and blue—the three colors that comprise the color on screens, a nod to my design work for web and social media. This plays well with the abstract printers marks and color bars that are a brand motif in my new marketing and identity collateral. The RGB concept also achieves the chromatic neutrality I was shooting for, in that the three colors (red, green, and blue, that is) form an equilateral triangle on the color wheel, cancelling each other out and eliminating ‘bias’ toward any hue.

Onward!

This rebrand has been a long, welcome period of self-reflection. I haven’t been 100% successful in dividing myself into two distinct ‘client’ and ‘designer’ personas, but I think I have done so enough during the process to arrive at a result that I’m happy with and that should have broad appeal to current and potential clients. You’ll still see the old logo around, mostly in blog posts discussing work completed while it was current. I’m excited to make myself some new business cards, and to add some yesIsaid branded merch and apparel to my RedBubble shop.

What do you think of yesIsaid’s new look? Feel free to drop me a line about it.