somehow, after a decade on the internet, i've become one of those people who has a whole Personal Brandâ„¢. at first i leaned into it on purpose, partly because i wanted to make videos as my shtick (until i didn't), and partly because i didn't really know how else to express myself on the internet early on. these days, however, keeping up a personal brand is less about Who I Am and more that i just enjoy graphic design. making this stuff is fun!
so over the past few years since coming out and rebranding as Skysometric, i've put a lot of work into a new logo, website design, icons, video thumbnails, and even more besides. i'm pretty proud of how it all turned out! and now that most of the heavy lifting is done, i'd like to write about how it went and some things i've learned along the way. there's a lot to talk about, so strap in for a pretty long series!
but, to start, i can't talk about Skysometric without a quick history lesson about WillWare, the old me – the one who got the ball rolling on graphic design in the first place.
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maybe this is obvious to the trained eye (or maybe not!), but i'm an entirely self-taught graphic designer. i've never taken any classes, studied design styles, learned the fundamentals, or even so much as had a single course teaching me how Photoshop works. (not that i use Adobe anymore, but you get my point!)
instead, everything i know, i learned by doing. i learned how image editing software works by making tiles and backgrounds for Mari0 levels. my fundamentals are deeply rooted in drawing mazes as a kid, so i quickly discovered how to set up grids in every image editor i got my hands on. i picked up other design techniques by attempting to imitate their logos or styles for personal projects over the years.
on the one hand, this means that i've developed a style and workflow that is wholly and uniquely my own! on the other hand, anytime i get stuck, i don't always have the tools to get un-stuck... or even the words to google it.
so instead of googling it, i used the tools i had to make all of this:
rest in peace, WillWare (the brand). clockwise from top left: logo, social media banner, video end slate, stream archive thumbnail.
what started as just a fancy logo to replace my old Sonic profile picture, snowballed into an entire branding suite across web and video! i learned a lot about graphic design as i gradually expanded these designs into my other creative pursuits. you can see so much of that self-taught style i described above in these few examples – geometric grids and graph paper, simple shapes and layers like my Mari0 work... and imitation of Google's Material Design guidelines, like drop shadows and color choices.
in fact, i leaned so hard on Material Design that, after some time, it no longer felt like my own style. anytime i wanted to branch out, i felt constrained by somebody else's design standards! so i challenged myself to find my own design style from scratch, which I called "New WillWare":
this neon light grid is still pretty dang inspired, but it's not "me" anymore.
it took a couple years of slow iteration to arrive at this neon-looking "light grid," and while it rocks, it also painted me into a corner. i had no idea how to make anything more than pretty promotional pictures in this style – i couldn't figure out how to make it work with video, webpages, or even just text, no matter how much i tried to go back to the drawing board. and my lack of formal experience made it that much more difficult to solve these problems!
so after a while, i felt pretty stuck. my old design didn't feel like my own, my new design was a dead end, and i felt like i was too invested in both to start completely from scratch again. i was simultaneously too burnt out to continue, and too scared to throw everything out and start fresh!
and then i transitioned, and started calling myself Sky.
in case you missed the *cough* subtle indicators, both of my old designs are centered around the letter W (being part of my old username and all). "Sky" does not have a W. so, uh, none of this fits anymore! even though i love this old work, and still consider it part of my history, it no longer accurately represents me or my identity. ready or not, it's time to design something new!
on one side, i felt pressure to get away from my old look, the product of a younger designer whose efforts were still the standard for my online presence. on the other side, i felt pressure to rise from the ashes of my redesign, make something of all the failures, successes, and lessons that i learned.
and thus, shedding my old brand identity and donning my new gender identity, i hit the sketchbook running.
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one of the first mazes i did fully digital without sketching it out first – it's just too big for paper! go from one dot to the other and back again along a different path.
this one's a simple maze, but i really love the pattern and at some point i might do a bigger one like this! the underlying pattern here is an alternate take on a diagonal maze – so maybe i could adapt one of my existing diagonal mazes to match...
this is one of my best ones from before high school, when i started to take the craft "more seriously" (knowingly or not). the parallel paths here are hard to follow, you may want to use a pen or stylus!
back when i used to carry my journal around with me, this is one that i was always SO proud of showing off – it looks absolutely gorgeous in person!
Super 1 was originally going to be a series of all the letters in the word Super, but like a true ADHD kid i stopped after the first one lol. this uses a perspective warping technique that's less technically complex than it looks – i originally sketched this one on paper!
the grid lines aren't fully erased here so it's a little raw, but it gives a good idea of how the underlying grid works. a surprising number of my mazes in this journal use a compass in some form or fashion...
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i've always loved experimenting with giving my mazes a 3D effect – besides just looking cool, they open the door to making unique solutions. this one is quite the glow-up compared to how it looked on paper!
it's a little raw, but not half bad for making this before high school! i even tried to give it a cute logo at the bottom~
this one is another mess of parallel passages and the first maze i ever digitized. some people say it's hard to look at, and i don't blame them!
it's small on paper, but that's because it uses a half-size grid – iirc, having nine spirals of a fixed size was just a couple squares too large for the full page...
Hi everyone! In light of coming out as genderfluid, I have a big announcement: I'm changing my name! You may remember me as WillWare, but from now on, I go by Sky ✨
*crickets*
What, is that not news? Okay, so maybe I've been putting off writing this post for a bit... *sigh* like a few months. But, as always, I wanted to do more than just say that I have a new name. In this post, I'd like to talk about why I changed my name, and what the future of my identity looks like.
Of course, changing my name is not a decision I made lightly. To be totally honest, I didn't want to give up WillWare at all! It's a great name, I've built up quite an identity around it, and changing my username literally everywhere on the web is a daunting process. Why go to all that trouble when I already like what I have?
The reason for this is twofold, and the first... is that "Will" makes me feel boxed in to being a guy. It's a traditionally male name, and as a genderfluid person, I want the freedom to feel like a guy or like a girl. Even back when all I knew is that I was nonbinary, I still had this issue; I tried going by any pronouns even back then, but I was only ever referred to as "he," and didn't even feel comfortable referring to myself as anything else!
When I came out as genderfluid, I remembered a name I had been kicking around since college: "Sky." It felt right, but I still wasn't sure – so I tried changing my name in a private Discord server, and that's when it clicked: This is my name. This is who I've always wanted to be. As much as I still love my old name, it's time to become something new.
For the record, I'm not getting rid of my old name; you can continue to call me Will or Sky and it's totally cool. In fact, I'm keeping Will as my middle name! But Sky is more accurate to who I am, and it's the name I will use for myself going forward.
The other reason I'm changing my name isn't as much about gender, but rather, identity... "WillWare" made me feel boxed into being a brand. This is at least partly my own fault for trying to build myself into a brand in the first place; even so, something definitely felt impersonal about it. This was fine back when I didn't quite know what my gender was yet (and I even leaned into it on some occasions), but I often felt like I was only a presence on the internet, rather than a person.
"Sky," meanwhile, is just my name – it's just me! And in a crucial time of my transition, where it's helping me feel more like a person than ever before (even IRL!), calling myself by just my name helps make it more concrete, more real.
Of course, I'm still a graphic designer at heart, and I love making fancy branding – that's not going anywhere. So my look is transitioning, too, to align with my new name! It's been slow going, but here's a sneak peek:
I'm not yet sure what else I want to do with it, but I do know that I even want to make this more personal than before, too. As such, this leans into the genderfluid color scheme, and makes the letter motif more obvious than with my old W. I'm excited to experiment with this and see where it takes me!
Until my new look is done, I've been using pictures of my OC Rivers for my social media (who I also want to talk about here soon!) – and, honestly, having a face instead of a hexagon has made me feel even more like a real person on the web. Maybe I'll even stick with that for a while... So as a parting gift, let me illustrate this with what may be my best tweet of all time – one that perfectly summarizes my feelings on my gender at present:
