Build Your Own Brand

Strategies, Prompts and Exercises for Marketing Yourself

Robin Landa

• Publisher: HOW Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781440324550
• eBook ISBN: 9781440324574
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

What is your brand?

As a designer your success depends on how you brand yourself and the service you provide. This book will help you explore, develop, distill, and determine a distinctive brand essence, differentiate yourself, and create your visual identity.

Build Your Own Brand is a guided journal designed to help you sketch, write, design, and conceive the way you brand yourself. More than 80 prompts and exercises will help you develop your:

• Personal brand essence
• Visual identity and style
• Resume and elevator pitch
• and much more!

Whether you're trying to land a new job or launch a design business, let this unique guide light the way. You'll find helpful advice, interviews, and prompts from esteemed psychologists, creative directors, brand strategists, designers, artists, and experts from a variety of disciplines. Build your own brand today!

“Design is a plan for action.” -Charles Eames

CHAPTER THREE

VISUAL IDENTITY

Visualizing Your Brand Story

The form of your personal brand (logo, résumé design, website design, color palette, and any imagery) should communicate your story. We’re all familiar with the twentieth-century precept from American architect Louis Sullivan, “Form ever follows function.” When it comes to branding, Brian Collins advises, “Form follows fiction.”

In the case of personal branding, we could coin it as: Form follows creative nonfiction. Each of us has an evolving creative nonfiction story (the facts of our existence and our practical abilities) combined with a narrative fiction (how we cast ourselves as we evolve personally and professionally). When you tell your story through the design of your personal brand, you give it visual and verbal form. Can your story allow for change as your skills and thinking evolve?

Your brand story will be told across multiple media platforms--print, desktop web, social media, mobile web, and more. Establishing a coherent look and feel across media platforms keeps your solutions unified, so they belong together by resemblance and voice. When someone sees any piece of your visual story, he or she can identify you. Each visual solution is independent, yet should not need to reintroduce itself to viewers.

Each media platform should make a unique contribution to telling your brand story. If the story is told exactly the same way in each medium, then your story is singular rather than dimensional. Each media platform has unique capabilities, which allow you to expand your portrait, your image--exploit those capabilities. Henry Jenkins, who conceived the idea of transmedia storytelling, said:

“In transmedia, elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole. Each medium does what it does best--comics might provide backstory, games might allow you to explore the world, and the television series offers unfolding episodes.” (http://www.fastcompany.com/1745746/seven-myths-about-transmedia-storytelling-debunked)

Paint the Broad Picture

Anyone’s experience with your personal brand is the product that you’re trying to create. Thinking through your goals and attributes, and planning your conception and design development will help you paint your broad picture.

You can establish a minor motif or a complex one. You can take a minor motif and turn it into a major one, too. If you break your story into small parts, you can look for patterns, parallels, and resonances to find thematic similarities. Your design concept does not have to be rigid. For example, a comedic concept can have nuance, with other kinds of emotions or moments, as long as it is unified.

Sean Adams of AdamsMorioka, advises:

“Being a responsible, skilled and talented designer is the same as a car having reliable wheels. This is the minimum requirement that is expected. What sets great designers apart is the ability to identify the qualities that are unique and personal to their identity, and promoting these relentlessly.”

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“Think of branding as connecting the dots. All points of contact (your cover letter, résumé, business card, website, promotional materials, etc.) must visually relate and project a consistent message. If one piece of communication is conservative, another aggressive and yet another demure, your visual voice will present as splintered, resulting in a confused consumer who doesn’t know what to expect when viewing a message from you. Most people you’re talking to don’t know you personally and are relying on your effective use of design elements to become familiar and comfortable with your brand.” -Dean James Ballas, www.dezignrogue.com

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“Typeface design is a very rigorous, almost scientific discipline where minuscule variations and adaptations reverberate in meaning and impact.” -Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

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Goals

Set some goals for the brand experience. It should:

• Break through via interesting form to capture the prospective employer/client’s attention
• Establish an emotional connection
• Induce positive emotions we all want to feel, such as joy, delight or amusement (Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls these “wantable” emotions)
• Exhibit your personal best through design and words
• Differentiate yourself using your core values
• Drive the storytelling with intention (make sure to offer a key take away)
• Weave your attributes throughout the “experience”
• Ensure that form follows story

Attributes

Elements How You Cast Yourself

Authenticity Élan Vital

Your Promise Deliverable Benefits

Drivers Passion and Values

Goals Relevance

Visual Voice Visual Interest

Planning Process

Consider the conception and design process:

• Envision three separate ideas. What is the driver for each concept? Type or image?
• Color palette + typeface(s) + imagery (photography/illustration/graphic interpretations) + patterns/textures
• Create a collage board theme to flesh out the visual thinking.
• Prototype the vision. Revise.

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Typography

Just like the sound of a specific human voice or musical instrument, every aspect and characteristic of an individual typeface endows those letterforms with a specific visual voice. Typography denotes and connotes--it gives visual denotative form to spoken words as well as communicating on a connotative level. The historical era and provenance of a typeface also implies added meaning to the primary message. Major characteristics that contribute to a typeface’s voice are: proportions of the letterforms, shapes of the letterforms, angle of stress, contrast between thick and thin strokes (or no contrast), variation in line width, shape of serifs, etc.

That said, some typefaces have qualities that yield stronger (or radical) voices, giving them a more active, distinctive role in the design solution. Some designers shy away from typefaces whose voices are too loud or quirky. Others use them sparingly.

Other typefaces are more neutral, complementing the image and contextualizing the communication. Some designers think neutral faces can be bland. Others...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Your Unique Sense and Sensibility
• Verbal Identity
• Visual Identity
• Case Studies
• Resources
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright