CREATING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND,

PART ONE

Jacob Ham

 

DATE

19th December 2016

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Branding can be a tricky task, even more so when you’re making it for yourself and I am sure every designer would agree with that. So, I decided to come up with a little series spanning over a few posts to help you create the brand that clients will instantly love.

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Your branding is the first thing any person looking at your work will see, so let’s make it memorable. Below are a few tips to help you get on the right track on choosing the perfect outcome.

 

Research is Key

In any project, conducting research is your first protocol when getting the ground running and it is no different when you aim to create your own personal brand. Your brand will play a big impact not only on you but on potential customers, so before you go to the drawing board. You need to figure out both your demographic and psychographic. In the end, outlining your ideal customer.

These should consist of things such as:

• Age range – What age are you targeting your services towards?

• Gender – Are you specifically aiming towards one gender or both?

• Lifestyle – What life do they live?

• Employment level – Corporate, self-employed, etc.

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Once you have that done and dusted, you can move on to designing your brand. What’s fun with that is your essentially your own customer.

 

Invest in you

Investing in yourself, especially in a project based around you can often be fun and involve learning. Before I started working on my personal brand, I decided it would be a great idea to buy some books based on the topic of Brand Identity to be exact, “Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler” and “Logo by Michael Evamy”. Not saying that you should go out and buy these books, even though I highly recommend them to anyone who has not created a brand before but it is a great idea to invest in your own career and what better way to do that than learn further.

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If you’re a designer, creating your own brand is a something you need to highly consider, you might not even doubt the question. Having one hundred percent control over the direction and ideas that are put on the table makes the project more fun and in the end more rewarding when your branding is fully finished.

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Even after your branding is finished, there is still room to invest. Printing your brand on merchandise or even as a printed portfolio, will most likely give you a buzz and in the end, you’ll be proud to call it “Your Brand”.

 

Rome wasn't built in a day

Don’t expect this to be a quick process, although research is important and can take a few days. Your design process could take weeks, months or even a year. Working on your personal branding can often be a project that goes on and off for a long time. I spent six months perfecting my logo before I showed anyone due to me not being happy with the outcome so far, but was totally worth the wait. During that time, I was working on a fair few client projects which I had to focus my attention on. There are various other aspects beside the logo that require time and effect to perfect, but the logo is the leading in importance as it will be what people remember.

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In part two of this series, I will be discussing on ways to choose the right decisions when designing your brand.