In the slideshow you can see how the branding has changed over the years. I started with a logo that was inspired by Malika Favre’s illustrations, with a bold funky modern vintage serif font. This first logo ended up being too detailed for our desired needs. We couldn’t put the logo on a hat. We also started with three brand colors: black, white, and a minty green.

On the business cards you can see our first attempt at adding branding elements and textures. We’re still in the rebranding stage, so we haven’t worked on that for the new logo. Originally we used different musical notation to reference the namesake of Troubador.

On the artboard screenshot you can see different color variations of the logos, expanded brand colors, and the fonts used in the logo.

In college, Dom and I had an assignment to create a lifesize digital portrait of ourselves. We were brainstorming ideas when we came up with the idea to do medieval knight style portraits with us mounted on our pets. Dom rid his cat, and I rid my dog. Afterwords, while we were living together we found and rescued a puppy that Dom kept for his own. His dog Dewey is the dog that the Troubador in the logo is now riding on.

I studied UI/UX design briefly in college, and after my contract at Hallmark ended I was going to update my portfolio sites, so I decided that I wanted to spend some time learning more about UI/UX, wireframing, and web design.

I found a tutorial from Dav DiProssimo on wireframing that detailed a five step process. You can see that written on the journal slide, but basically the steps are:

1. Headline

2. Hero Image

3. Benefits & Features of Your Service

4. Social Proof

5. Call to Action

After having that as a starting base I found different wireframe designers and watched their process. So I made 3 rectangles and divided it up into sections. I can be the kind of designer that has an idea and knows that they want to go in that direction.

My first wireframe is the most similar to the original Troubador site, which used to not have as a clear a path to results.

The second wireframe has me looking for ways that I can do everything differently, but not getting too wild since I knew I wanted to stick close to the original site. The social proof section is the toughest part for troubador. Troubador is a business, kinda. And it isn’t, kinda. That kind of grey area is confusing to a lot of people and doesn’t offer social proof. Troubador isn’t a 9-5 where we have employees. It’s an umbrella where freelancers can work under and pitch clients with our combined or singular services.

The 3rd wireframe has me showing things that I don’t necessarily want, and things that I don’t know are possible with my skill level or just aren’t affordable. We’re using a squarespace template and somethings just are not possible, and some things are, but they cost a price that we can’t justify. Unique shape dividers are something that I think is cool, and something we tried to implement, but we needed a 3rd party service that we ultimately decided was not worth the price.

After I made those three wireframes, I consulted with the programmer and the other designer involved in Troubador to get critique and feedback. We ended up going with a hybrid approach that took parts of each wireframe that we collectively liked best. I often act as a creative director in my role at Troubador, but I’m a young designer and sometimes I want that direction and critique, so when I shift my role to a design lead, I can utilize the other members to improve the work.

I have more detailed writeups on some of these individual projects on Troubador where you can see more project details and a few case studies. The majority of work I do with Troubador is out of house, but I wanted this page to serve as a bit more of a case study on what I’ve worked on in house.