I didn’t set out to become a brand designer.
While studying computer graphics in the United States, I would share my work on Facebook. Friends began asking me to make logos and emblems for their student organizations. As the requests grew, I started charging for the time I put into them, and my friends paid from their organizations’ budgets. Work I was making as a student had become something other people needed—and would pay for.
Through word of mouth, those requests reached student founders and local business owners. A logo led to advertising materials, signs, websites, and photography. I wasn’t calling all of it “branding” at the time. I was taking on what was needed, helping small businesses find a way to present themselves as they took shape.
The Work Needed a Business of Its Own
Working with businesses involved more than sending over design files. There were contracts, receipts, and transactions to handle. That led me to set up an LLC.
I hadn’t started with a plan to grow a company. I needed one to take on the work and deliver it properly. One by one, things outside the design itself needed my attention.
I also worked on websites with friends who had started development companies. When a project came through a friend’s company, I handled the design. When one came through mine, their company handled the development. Working together let me follow the screens I designed through to websites people could actually use.
A Logo Was Only Part of the Introduction
The student founders I worked with had ideas and technical skills. How to present those ideas to someone encountering their business for the first time was often still an open question.
Even a logo request brought us back to the business itself. What did it do? Who was it for? What impression should it leave? Choosing a visual direction required understanding the business.
There were still decisions to make after the logo was finished. We needed to think about the value the service offered people, then what to show first on a website, how a sign would help people recognize the business, and what to capture in a photograph. The deliverables were different, but they were all explaining the same business.
Looking back, those connections were what interested me. I might start by making a graphic, but my interest grew to include where it would be used and what it needed to communicate.
I Wanted to Understand the Business Around the Design
After my undergraduate degree in graphics, I studied technology management at graduate level. I wanted to understand more of the business context around the work: what needed to be made, and why it was needed.
I later worked at an advertising agency in the United States before moving to Korea and becoming a brand designer in small organizations. I’m now in my ninth year as a brand designer. I’ve worked at four startups, from newly established businesses to a company in its tenth year, across B2B and O2O services.
The job title could stay the same while the work changed considerably. One company needed to establish how it presented itself. Another needed a familiar brand to express a broader direction. Elsewhere, the task was to help more people use the standards that already existed.
Over time, that changed how I thought about what I could do as a brand designer. Alongside the things I could make, I began considering what the company was trying to do and how my experience and judgment could help.
Still Finding What Needs Doing
In a small company, work doesn’t always arrive with a neat label. Just as an early logo request could grow into a website, working on one thing often reveals something else that needs attention.
At a new company, there are things that haven’t been put in place yet. At an older one, there may be years of accumulated work to sort through. You pull at one task, and others come up with it, like potatoes on a vine.
That doesn’t mean taking on everything you notice. A small team has limited time and capacity. Seeing what needs work matters, and so does deciding what to do first. To make that choice, I need to understand what is happening around the design.
I still return to a few familiar questions. What does this company need to explain, and to whom? Where do people encounter it, and what needs to be sorted out first?
The scale and circumstances are different from making logos for friends. But I still enjoy understanding what someone is trying to do and finding a way to help other people see it. The work that began with those logos has kept taking me into new things.