An expressive and personality filled online space for a brand identity designer and illustrator.

A challenge that many designers face when building their portfolio websites is the balance of letting your own brand shine through while not overwhelming or taking the focus away from your work. That was the underlying challenge here throughout the entire project. How can we make sure we bring in the perfect amount of Taylor’s own personality and the way she see’s her own brand, while sharing the stage with her work? And how can we make sure everyone gets their own chance to shine?

First, Taylor spent time building out and fine-tuning her brand’s identity with additional illustrations, curated mockups to showcase her work, as well as adorable illustrations that show her personality and her amazing animation skills.

For the site, we made sure we showed her client work as front and center as possible while wrapping the work in the TSS brand’s personality. With sections that were focused more on copy or only featured a few client images - we let the TSS brand shine through by wrapping some of them in a vine like border for extra personality or adding in illustrations or motion graphics to showcase Taylor’s animation skills.And with sections where we wanted the focus to be more on the client work, we made the images engaging as we could and let them to do all of the work.

What resulted was a website that shows and tells the love and personality Taylor brings to her client projects and to own her brand. Coupled with just the right amount of copywriting that gives the right amount of background at the right times - the new Tay Smith Studio site is an optimized and cohesive place where Taylor can easily integrate more of her work for years to come.