Robin Landa - Build Your Own Brand: Strategies, Prompts and Exercises for Marketing Yourself

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To your brilliant career

To be yourself in a wold that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never forget that building your own brand is about determining the things that make you different from every other designer, and shining a white-hot spotlight on them. -Drew Davies, Owner, Oxide Design Co.

What if people could evaluate your talent and skill based only on shapes and colors? What if people could understand your essence through one visual symbol? Or a short social media profile?

That is the task--to build a personal (subjective) visual identity from symbolic graphic elements and parts. Define your essence through design and words. Define your essence in a few shapes. The resulting shapes may look deceptively simple because they are a result of a complex distillation process, a concentrated condensation of who you are into a design. To develop and produce a visual and verbal response to a personal identity communication problem, you must discern meaning from information, go through creative and conceptual processes drawing upon information, research and iterations of creations boiled down into a solution, which has been shaped by layers of meaning. Every word and every graphic element tells.

You may not feel like a brand. Youre an individual, not a cookie or a car. You may not even be a big fan of using branding terms for individuals--not even for famous individuals such as Jennifer Lopez or John Grisham.

To secure a creative career, however, you have to be a recognizable type of something, which is how one dictionary defines brand. To break through, you need to make an indelible impression on your audience. And thats what this book will help you do.

Building your own brand entails using your design expertise to create an original visual and verbal identity for yourself. You are not a corporation so your identity should not look like a corporate identity. Nor are you exactly like every other designer, so your bio shouldnt read like anyone elses. Your typography, composition and copy should reflect your design sense and sensibility. There are many admirable portfolios out there. An engaging personal brand identity can ensure notice of yours.

Creating a transmedia personal branding program entails weaving some common threads through all visual and verbal components across media, with the understanding that each medium can offer unique brand experiences for the audience. This means you have to formulate and create a strategic and unified program. Rather than approaching individual formats (such as your visual identity or website design) as isolated design solutions, it is a strategic imperative to see every expression and platform--from the visual identity to the self-promotions--as a contributor to the entire branding. This cohesive approach is critical to creating an experience based on your unique visual and verbal presence.

Why do you need to tell a story? Context. Human interest. A brand story tells the world precisely who you are and what you have to offer.

Whether in the form of song lyrics (regardless of genre--rock, rap, opera, pop, R&B, country); fiction or films, documentaries or video games, people love stories and find meaning in stories.

Theres a reason you see human interest stories on the news. In his book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall writes, Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story.

People more easily remember a story well told as opposed to remembering a list or facts. Gottschall writes, We all have a life story that defines us--a narrative that describes who we are and how we got this way. But our comically unreliable self-narration is underpinned by boldly fictionalized memories. We are our stories, and those stories are more truthy than true. (http://jonathangottschall.com/big-ideas/)

To tell a story, you dont have to be a writer. A single image can tell a story. Image plus words can tell a story, as they do in advertising or single-panel cartoons (just think of The New Yorker cartoons) or on book covers or posters. Certainly, we can also use motion graphics or an illustration to tell a story.

The cumulative effect of a visual and verbal identity tells a story about your personality, sense, sensibility, skills--it defines you and how you got that way. Can you literally tell a story? Sure. Can you tell a story cobbled together with words and images? Of course. Forming a story as the underpinning of what you do will help congeal your identity, help people seize on your identity. You are the lead character in this story.

Strategy is the core tactical underpinning of branding, uniting all your planning for every visual and verbal expression. The brand strategy defines your personality and promise. Who are you? What value do you promise to deliver?

Strategy also differentiates you from the competition by defining your position against the competition. You can formulate a construct--a core strategic concept that positions you (in an employers or clients mind) against the competition--based on any insight into your own qualities or expertise, or on a personal attribute, such as originality, heritage, wit, or wisdom.

Several factors must be considered when formulating your strategy:

Differentiation: You create a unique visual and verbal presence.

Authenticity/Ownership: You own an identifiable attribute, quality, personality, or posture.

Consistency: Your construct is used across media, creating a coherent personal brand voice and tone in all verbal and visual communication. (Dont think of it as matched luggage but there should be coherence.)

Relevance: The branding is based on an insight into you and your target audience.