My name is Joel Thomas Flaherty. 

My purpose as a professional designer is driven by my ability to realise ideas of simplicity and uniqueness. I steer towards solutions using the bare minimum to realise ideas that are practical, sustainable and useful.

Above is my design of my personal branding JTF, my initials. Below is an explination of my process to create it.

An image popped into my mind (happens a lot) of a font I'd seen around, a bit like a Torii Gate, so I had a short font searching session to look at J's, T's and F's.

I really enjoyed the process of making this bird into a logo so I applied the same technique for my personal branding. Red, black and white have important spiritual meanings in Japanese culture and are used often, especially red. I like the contrasting effect and the Red Backed Wren wears them, so I used it again. The bird sitting on the angled edge was a bit of a minimalist style influence so I continued exploring shapes with sharp angles for the branding as well.
Deconstructing the Kanji for bird into an image without adding new lines was great, bit of a word puzzle design challenge, tried the same for Gen kanji, in the next image.

I'm drawing some designs with pen on paper as I use my digital application Affinity Designer to supplement the process. As I drew the topline of JF it reminded me of a Kanji character "Gen" which I imported into Affinity and converted to a curve and proceeded to change the shape of Gen into a JF. It was good to bend the character into another character, felt like I was respecting the design more than if I was chopping it up.

How to choose one out of all? Actually, it emerged rather than being chosen. I asked my partner, who is Japanese, which one she liked and she was liking the grey one but it was looking like an old man. I started changing the colours, shades of grey. As I was changing each of the designs she liked how I applied a black outline and a conversation began. The black outline made it less noticeable as a Kanji character and more like an English word thus making the JTF stand out more. The logo also became cuter, somehow. It helped to have a second opinion.