Self Branding / Initial Visual Ideas

In terms of visual branding, I feel that initials are a good place to start. Here are some first ideas, ranging from very poor to quite strong.

With these first two I was trying to create something too clever with the capital letters A and F. When I actually considered my personality and graphic output so far, I do lean towards a clean, simple aesthetic and this clever visual play doesn't actually represent my personality or graphic design style.

For these next few I tried to distill some of my characteristics into the aesthetics - which is the point of the exercise I guess...

I embraced my favourite colour scheme; black, maroon and cream and used the circle motif which always seems to spring to my mind first when creating something visual.

I've used Avenir medium throughout, one of my favourite typefaces, heavily geometric (notably circular).

Here I feel that the cicle takes up too much prominence and as it is simply an aesthetic quirk that I have, I feel it should be less imposing.

Smaller Red circle here but beginning to look like I may have Japanese connections.

I do like the simplicity of placing the initials at the top on their own, in black. The maroon text plays off nicely, but not with the maroon circle too.

Here's what I've come to so far, I replaced the red dot with a larger white circle, working with negative space and being much more subtle.

The colours work really well and the minimalism hopefully conveys the minimalist style I've used throughout the course so far.