Christopher Hesselberg is a photographer specialising in capturing high quality product pictures of exclusive watches and jewellery for high-end clients like Bolou Fine Jewellery. Christopher’s brand and website, however, needed an upgrade to match the high standard of his pictures and ambitions for his future clientele.
SERVICES
Visual Identity
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Logo Design
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Webdesign
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Print design

Creating a personal brand
Christopher is a tall guy, with a signature bronze-red beard. He’s down to earth, very approachable and funny, but also extremely dedicated and passionate – a perfectionist.
Apart from the significant red beard, another special thing about Christopher is that he has ADD and Tourette’s syndrome, and is heavily dyslexic as well. But despite struggling with all this at a young age, in his later years, Christopher has become very honest and outspoken about it – a strength, I really wanted to use in his visual identity.
These unique, visual and mental characteristics, as well as Christopher’s own mission of providing his clients a great, personal service, were the main inspirations for the personal brand.
Colors
Christopher’s warmth and down-to-earth-ness inspired the colors for his brand. In fact, the primary color of the brand, is a bronze color eyedropped from Christopher’s beard. Yep! We even discussed changing his primary color based on the season, as Christopher’s beard becomes a lot lighter in the summer.
I also went in and tweaked the colors to make sure that the HSB values were exactly dividable by 5, something I knew Christopher would appreciate as a person who can’t leave the volume on the TV at 4, or 9, or 14 – it has to be 5, 10 or 15.





Logo
Initially, we talked about a small update of his existing logo, but as soon as I started working with it we agreed to redesign it entirely.
The new logo combines Christopher’s initials, which made up his original logo, in a design inspired by an eye, a camera lens, and a clock. In fact, Christopher’s “c” is modelled after the time ten minutes past two o’clock – the exact time Christopher always sets on watches when taking photos.



Typography
Since Christopher is dyslexic, when picking the typography for his brand, I got the idea to only use small letters. This gives the brand a very unique touch, and also a very informal tone, which we both agreed worked well.
Originally, I even wanted to incorporate animations of misspelled words on Christophers website, as a way to highlight and maybe even try to normalise his dyslexia. The theory was, him completely owning it in this way, could cut him some slack when emailing with customers because it’s just part of who he is, and it’s his brand. However, Christopher wasn’t too keen on this idea, and I of course completely respect that. A personal brand has to feel right.
Website
Christopher’s original website was made using Adobe Portfolio which was very restrictive, so he agreed to move onto a WordPress solution.

While designing and developing the website, I focused especially on the tablet version, since Christopher has a tablet and uses it when he is out on the go. It was important for him that he would be able to show a potential new client his work on a smaller screen.