The flexible visual identity
for a personal brand
1. Introduction
There are different reasons why people start to develop and promote their personal brands. Some want to be famous and earn money. Some want to find the job of their dream, and some have a solid aesthetical need — to have a style that fits them great. I firmly believe that all these three human needs are essential to the modern world, but the final goal of personal brand development is to become yourself.
2. Holistic approach VS populist approach
So many courses offer people the ability to build a personal brand, but most suggest doing it on the tactical level. What do I mean by talking about the tactical level? Personal and other brands (consumer, employer, geographical, etc.) are integral to marketing. Because I have a strategic marketing background, I can simplify as much as possible and tell what marketing is about. It's about two sub-activities: creating a product and promoting a product.
Creating a product is a strategic-level activity. At that stage, we, marketing professionals, research markets and competitors. We dive into target audience segments to understand their needs to create products that will meet and even anticipate their demands. Then we create a brand positioning, messages, and identities to be understandable for people. We develop go-to-market plans and set specific communication channels relevant to our target audience. And only after that do we step into the next stage.
Promoting a product is a tactical-level activity. At that stage, we use a specific set of channels suitable to advertise our products. For example, if we're talking about social media, we hire a team to manage it professionally. At least we need a social media strategist, copywriter, designer, and targeting professional to implement our marketing and brand strategies. Without such input data as brand positioning, brand character, and brand benefits, hiring such a team is hazardous because their activity will not be connected with brand, marketing, and business strategy.
I hope now you understand the comparison and connection between those two marketing aspects. First, strategy. Second, tactics. The holistic approach requires a long self-exploration but gives you strong motivation and energy to promote your personal brand because it leads you to behave like yourself. The populistic approach gives you instruments within a short time that you can use to promote yourself. But the question is, what kind of you will be promoted, true or fake?
Building a personal brand without understanding your authentic characteristics and setting clear goals leads to rapid burnout and a lack of motivation for further action.
3. The holistic (strategic) approach
Building a personal brand has only one difference from building a consumer brand, and you have to face competitive analysis, brand platform, and go-to-market plan development. However, in the research stage, you should not dive into the target audience's aspects and needs but into your inner world. I believe the most powerful way to understand your values and mindsets is to work with a clinical psychologist. But these instruments and tests can help you to understand yourself better too:
7) Disc
The deeper you understand yourself, the more authentic your personal brand will be. The stage of self-exploring can move along with competitive and benchmark analysis. We must understand the characteristics of people from our niche. We should clearly understand how to be noticeable in the crowd. Only by having competitive analysis conclusions and self-research conclusions can we create a brand platform — the core document on which all your activities will be built. And that set of instruments makes the approach holistic, deep, and conscious.
If you want to dive deeper into the two stages I mentioned above, please visit my website, where I give more details about the strategic part of the case study. Here I will start the story directly from the brand platform and then move on to the flexible visual identity part.
4. Brand Platform
Here is what my brand platform based on self-exploring and competitive analysis stages, looks like.
5. Visual Identity Idea
According to my values and brand character, the visual identity had to be sturdy, bold, and straightforward. It also had to be very flexible and comfortable to use. Because I was oriented on the North American market, I thought there had to be something connected with the Slab Serif font. Slab also was very suitable for broadcasting my strategic background.
I also thought about farm-style photos for my family to broadcast our values and preferred lifestyle in harmony with the earth and nature. It all had to create a vision of a handy guy who is not afraid of intellectual and physical work and is not scared of challenges.
6. Logo
I've started experimenting with the logo, making some drafts, trying not only to find the character that would match the brand platform but also to imagine how it can be applied to various communication channels.
Finally, I ended up going with this option:
Well, the surname looked well-nit, as strategies that I developed. But it lacked a creative component that would be contrasting and bring a little creative mess into it. I thought that a calligraphy name element would be an excellent addition. So, I asked lettering and calligraphy designer Julia Kuznetsova to help me with that work. She designed different angled and proportioned expressive letters to show the creative part of my personality.
Depending on the size of the graphic layout, the logo can be transformed and simplified by removing serifs.
7. Flexible typography
Based on the logo, I designed two alphabets — with and without serifs. The alphabet with serifs is made for large-size objects, like posters, murals, and... spaceships (haha, why not?), and the alphabet without serifs will be more useful in small formats.
Font characteristics change depending on the task and context.
It allows me to use my visual identity as a flexible verbal and visual language.
8. Design System
I chose the letters as the central point of a flexible visual system. That allows me to create infinite combinations, patterns, and shapes by combining them in various ways.
Image by alexandercho on Freepik
9. Insights and conclusions
Finally, I want to say that it was the most enjoyable project in my life. It is a fantastic feeling when your inner world connects with your appearance. It is more pleasant to wear a t-shirt with your name rather than someone, what do you think? Do you want to feel it? Feel free to write me DM on any social media or via WhatsApp!
10. Gratitude
I want to thank people without whom the creation of such work would be impossible.
First is Julia Kuznetsova, whom I mentioned above. Thank you so much for your deep and comprehensive education approach to lettering and typography! Thanks to you, I discovered the wonderful world of letters!
The second person is Johan Debit from Brand Brothers Studio, who inspired me with his works based on modular typography.
Finally, I want to mention Dr. Martin Lorenz, who just blew my mind with his Flexible Visual Systems Book. He owns TwoPoints.Net design studio, and I highly recommend all his courses which will give you true systematic thinking and overturn your thinking about design. Dr. Martin creates exceptional visual identities (including identities based on modular typography). Join his Patreon page and participate in the global flexible visual systems designers community! Let’s promote a flexible design as a universal language all humankind understands!
