Hi Reader,
Time for confession. 🤭
I've been unhappy with my branding for a few years now. Not my name — I still love Launch the Damn Thing® with all the love I had when I came up with it. But the design? The visual side of the brand? It's been giving me that 'something's off but I can't name it' feeling for months, maybe even a few years. Technically fine. Just... not right.
If you've visited my website in the last few years and noticed things shifting around — different fonts, little tweaks here and there — that wasn't indecisiveness. (Okay, it was a little indecisiveness.) It was me trying to fix a problem I couldn't quite name for myself. Why? Forest. Trees. 🥴 🌳🌳 (Can't see 'em because I'm in the middle of it.)
It started with my original brand font. I loved it. I still love it, honestly. But it didn't have an italics option, and after a few years of working around that limitation, the annoyance hit a tipping point. So I went hunting for a replacement.
That was several years ago. I have tested ~ 5 to 10 different fonts since then, at a minimum. 😂
Not casually, either. I'm talking full brand redesign & new logo exports. Writing Custom CSS to get them on my website. Color adjustments for improving accessibility. At one point I did a whole rebrand around a font I really liked — and still struggled with actually using it. It actually felt a lot like wearing a perfectly nice outfit that just doesn't feel like you when you look in the mirror; like my brand was wearing the wrong clothes.
So I kept looking. Last year I found one I was genuinely excited about — big font family, tons of styles, had everything I needed. I jumped in & tested it out, installing it everywhere & getting the font licenses I needed.
Except it didn't play well with Squarespace's new custom font upload option, and I had trouble overwriting those issues with Custom CSS. Then I started noticing other people using it in their own rebrands. Two that I caught, probably more that I missed. And that feeling of "wait, this isn't special anymore" crept in and just... never left.
I sat with it for a while, wondering if I'd get over it or accept it.
I didn't. 🤣 Of course.
So last month, in my actual free time — laptop open on a weekend, TV on for background noise, and nobody pinging me for anything — I started over this time. From scratch. Again. I went looking for something I couldn't find in my usual spots, —harder to stumble across and with all the right character traits I wanted: soft but hard, friendly but bold, modern but almost nostalgic, professional but approachable.
And I found it. 🎉
I'm not ready for the full reveal yet — the rebrand is still in progress — but I spent hours playing with it in Affinity (partly to reprogram my Adobe-brain to learn Affinity better). At some point, I hit a stride and thought, "oh. there it is!"
Something finally began to click, after feeling forced or boxed in for way too long, and it feels GOOD to get this far in this experiment of a rebrand process. 😃
If you watch today's video all the way to the end... you might catch a sneak peek! 😉 I hid something in the video because the topic felt too fitting not to, and I thought it'd be fun!
No spoilers — but, James Franco is involved. 🤭😂 Shh! 🤫🤐
