People keep asking about the bear. Fair enough — it's in the nav, the menu, the favicon, and it stares at you from every link preview. I'd love to tell you it came out of a rigorous brand sprint with moodboards and a naming workshop. It didn't. It was a warm-up doodle before a client call. Five minutes, one brush pen, one grumpy bear. It made me laugh, so it stayed.
But the reason it stayed is an actual branding lesson, I promise. I'd spent weeks before that trying to design myself a 'proper' identity — geometric monograms, refined wordmarks, the full portfolio-brand starter pack. All of it competent. None of it mine. The bear was unreasonable, slightly aggressive, and a bit funny — which, honestly, is a fair review of how I work.
A personal brand isn't the mark you'd design for a client. It's the thing you keep doodling when nobody's paying. The polish came later — I redrew the curves, balanced the negative space, made sure it survived at 16 pixels. But the teeth stayed. Every sensible person told me to soften it. Every time I tried, it turned into another forgettable circle-animal logo. Memorable beats likeable. Especially at favicon size.
If there's a takeaway, it's this: when a mark makes you feel something specific — even mild menace — protect that feeling through every polish pass. Refine the geometry all you want. Never refine the personality.
02 It's also a bit of a self-portrait
There's a reason it stuck past the branding lesson, too. I grew up in the Pyrenees, mountains starting more or less at the garden fence, and bears live where I'm from — not as decoration, an actual local headline every few years. I know exactly what they're like from the inside of that landscape: quiet for most of the year, occasionally sociable, mostly happy to be left to their own patch of forest.
That's a fair description of how I work, too. I do my best thinking alone, headphones on, nobody asking anything of me for six hours straight — bear-in-the-woods mode. But I'm not a hermit about it; I like a good studio session, a client call that turns into an actual conversation, sharing a rough cut with someone whose opinion I trust. Solitary by default, sociable on purpose. The bear does both. So do I.
And nature isn't just backdrop for me — it's closer to a working condition. Growing up with actual mountains outside the window sets a baseline you don't unlearn; put me somewhere flat and grey for long enough and the work gets flatter and greyer too. The bear's a Pyrenean mark with a different postcode now, but the woods it came from never really left.