This week we looked at personal brands.
A personal brand is a brand reflecting an individual and their interests, determining how others perceive them. I see personal brands like a blend between personal and professional life; how you present yourself in a professional setting.
I was intrigued to learn about personal brands, as this is something that I’ll need to establish in the near future, including second year to reflect who I am as a designer. I made note of some of the prompt question points we were provided with so that I can refer to them again in future:
We followed this up by looking at some ways that a personalised brand may look and key features that they often include. Often, someone's name is the name of their personal brand so that it’s clear who it is identified with. Many people opt for presenting their brand with a pictorial mark of themselves, however personal brands nostalgic often use a monogram of the individuals initials of a logo. Although they are larger non-personal brands, many designer companies came to mind, such as Louis Vuton come to mind of examples of brands that use name monograms.
In other ways, personal brands are very similar to actual brands. They still have colour pallets, touch points, typefaces and decorative elements.
One point I found particularly interesting is that some brands don’t appreciate too much effort for a personal brand. This dosen’t mean that we shouldn’t put work into a personal brand, but instead that it might not be a good idea to overcomplicate. Our tutor pointed out that this is particularly important is developing a personal brand for a design website or portfolio, as it can take away from your work.
‘One Cannot Not Communicate’
I found the above quote stood out to me during today's lecture, as I've never really thought about visual communication in this way. Regardless of how simple a brand is, it still communicates something. I will keep this in mind when it comes to developing a personal brand for myself at a later stage, as understanding what I communicate will be the base of how my brand is percieved. For example, having a public social media with the same name as your personal brand might not be a good idea.
We were given a task of creating a personal brand for a classmate. I chose classmate and friend, Christel, and vice versa.
We spent a while establishing a set of brand values and a mission for the person we chose. This was definitely the most difficult part of this task, as it’s so difficult to create such a personal-focused thing for someone and come up with their values/mission, as you dont know how accurate to inaccurate you will be. I came up with the following: