ICYMI, I have a travel blog. Or not so much a traditional blog, but an online presence where I’ve compiled all of my recent travel recommendations to share with my friends & family when they ask me, “what should I do in [insert place here]?”

The funny thing is that over the few years that I’ve had it, I’ve struggled with the same thing so many of my branding clients come to me struggling with: I couldn’t figure out what I ACTUALLY wanted it to look & feel like. I’ve tinkered with the brand & design more times than I could count, never feeling fully satisfied. Until recently.

A few weeks ago, while working in Mexico for the week, I had an “aha” moment about what I wanted my “blog” to really be:

• I didn’t actually want it to be a traditional blog. The point, from its very inception, was to have an easy place to send my friends to when they ask me for travel recommendations. I wanted it to feel like an organized, well designed Google doc of travel recs. (For the sake of simplicity throughout this post though, I am just going to call it a blog).
  
  
• I wanted it to feel like a scrapbook of my travels.
  
  
• I needed to SIMPLIFY it.
  
  

So I got to work on creating a brand & design that embodied these things – and here’s where I landed.

The name & logo

I started this blog back in 2021 under the name “I Hope this Finds You Well.” I loved this name — it made fun of corporate email culture, and allowed me to give the blog a wellness spin if I wanted to — but it was too much of a mouthful, and even the domain name was hard to remember.

So then I decided to change it to just my name – Carly Russell. But that made it feel like a personal brand, which it wasn’t.

And that’s when I realized. This blog is just supposed to be a compilation of my travel recs. THAT’S IT! So a new name (if you could call it that) & logo was born:

The font system

For the typography that I used throughout the blog, I wanted something that found the balance between handwritten scrapbook-style and modern, clean, simple typography:

The color palette

I wanted the colors to be bright and fun, but in a way that wouldn’t clash with the travel photos that would be showcased throughout the site. I went with shades of green & blue, which remind me of the outdoorsy nature of traveling, with a pop of orange:

The graphic elements & illustrations

This is where the fun really begins. Since I wanted it to feel scrapbooky, there were various graphic elements I needed to source & create to get this feel in a way that felt random-but-consistent at the same time.

First, I compiled traditional scrapbook or bullet journal elements like the dot grid background, ripped paper, printed photo frames (like the polaroid), and different kids of tape:

And I wanted to incorporate some of my own illustrations that looked like stickers that could appear in scrapbook or a journal:

And finally, I wanted each blog post’s featured photo to utilize all the graphic elements to feel like it belonged in a scrapbook:

The finished product

When I put all of these elements together, I FINALLY landed with a blog filled to the brim with all of my recent travel recs that I can share with friends & family when they ask. Check out the live version here & let me know what you think!

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