Best of Behance: Personal Projects

For creatives of any level, personal projects are the best means at your disposal for guiding the direction your career takes. Self-directed projects grant you a degree of freedom to explore subject matters of personal significance in a way professional projects seldom do, and this more intimate connection can often result in some of your greatest work.

Beyond just the opportunity to combine your personal interests with your professional craft, without any clients or team members to appease, you’re free to express yourself without compromise. These projects showcase your personality in its most undiluted form and serve as a great tool for attracting new clients and more fulfilling work. For that reason, it’s important to make the time to create these projects throughout your career as you collect new skills and interests to keep your professional development in alignment with your personal goals.

Here’s a collection of some projects from Behance that I think best exemplify the ways you can fuse your professional craft with personal interests to turn heads and lead to exciting new opportunities.

Source: Luana Lloyd

Source: Luana Lloyd

Source: Luana Lloyd

This first project, titled Zum-zum, is a zine created by Lisbon-based art director, designer, and illustrator, Luana Lloyd. Zum-zum is Lloyd’s attempt at translating the feelings experienced while listening to joyous music into visuals on the page. The zine’s format follows a 2-page spread with the first page serving to introduce the track title and artist of the song in question, and the second page housing Lloyd’s graphic compositions aimed at expressing the feel of the track. I think the decision to use the format of a magazine rather than standalone illustrations was clever as it allowed Lloyd to craft a visual identity for the body of work as a whole, demonstrating their abilities in branding, layout, and illustration simultaneously while potentially putting them on the radar of some of the labels or artists featured in the work.

Source: Miss Marpl

Source: Miss Marpl

Source: Miss Marpl

This next project is a collection of reimagined badges for some of the teams participating in the recent FIFA World Cup. These sorts of projects that involve reinterpreting an existing property can be a great exercise for graphic designers. They allow you to demonstrate your ability to work within set parameters to honor the history of a brand or mark, while also showing how your unique thinking can usher it into the next stage of its evolution. This particular project also benefits from its timing, as its topical subject matter made it more likely to be discovered. Miss Marpl also has a backlog of work within the realm of soccer, which makes this project read as authentic rather than opportunistic, a quality potential clients would like to see.

Source: Carlos Jiménez Varela

Source: Carlos Jiménez Varela

Source: Carlos Jiménez Varela

This last project is a collection of images created by Carlos Jiménez Varela, combining their love for sneakers with photo compositing and retouching. What makes this series great is that it demonstrates not only technical abilities like a strong understanding of both lighting and perspective, but creativity in the pairing of shoes with environments to create interesting color interactions or highlight some of the shoe’s design inspirations. The various immediate applications of these pieces in print and digital advertising are obvious and the quality of their execution is at a level that I’m sure would have many art directors eager to get in touch. Looking at the rest of their work, you can see they’ve done similar paid campaigns with New Balance and Hat Club, so clearly, using your technical skills and creativity to showcase something you love is a winning strategy