Intentional Personal Branding
Creating a personal brand with meaning
So I finally have my rebranded portfolio website up! (It might still be a little buggy, tho…) But this is my fourth time redesigning my personal brand, and my second time within the past year I believe. On the first go around, I was fairly new to design and development going under the brand name RBDeveloper. I was doing freelance web development work as I was still learning HTML and CSS, for friends and family. I was still designing websites in Photoshop back then. I had so much to learn… But my portfolio was a static website under the url RBDeveloper.de (gross…). As I started to get more into user experience and interaction design in my studies and freelance work, I changed my brand to Ryan B. Designs. I kind of cheated with my portfolio website by buying a wordpress theme, and finding some cool images and textures that I liked. For my logo, I made a vector of my handwriting for the initials RBD. That website lasted me for a while, until I took my Digital Design course in DePaul’s HCI program, where we were challenged to create a branded portfolio website for the quarter. I focused this time on hardcoding a new wordpress theme from scratch, and a little bit of energy on some of the design elements. While I felt that the website looked cool, and the designed materials looked polished, something was missing. Leading me to a couple of months ago, when I decided to take a more intentional approach to my personal brand elements.
Who is Ryan B?
At the beginning of my rebranding activities, I started with an introspective. I took some time to think about what’s important to me, what’s important to the user’s who I design for, what’s important to my employer. Out of this exercise I came up with an extensive list of my values for my personal brand.
Brand Values
- Adaptability
- Growth (professional)
- Credibility
- Creativity
- Innovation
- Ambition
- Competence
- Continuous Learning
- Vision
- Well-being
- Empathy
- Challenge
- Collaboration
- Curiosity
- Decisiveness
- Diversity
- Empowerment
- Entrepreneurship
- Knowledge
- Simplicity
Once I had an extensive list of brand values, I was able to further understand my brand’s identity and articulate the types of emotions that I want elicit with my brand.
Brand Identity
- Smart
- Adaptable
- Credible
- Empathetic
- Creative
- Collaborative
Brand Emotions
- Confident
- Compassionate/Empathetic
- Trustworthy
- Cool
- Curious
- Modern
Using my brand identity and emotions I was able to come up with the following mission statement for my personal brand:
I create innovative & cool products by incorporating empathy, curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge. By incorporating research & collaboration to my design process, I build products that solve diverse problems.
Logo Design
My previous logo for my brand was a nod to the Fibonacci sequence. It was meant to encompass the ideology that design is more than just aesthetics, but this meaning was conveyed poorly, and most people did not get the reference. With my new found understanding of my brand values, identity, emotions and mission, I could really be thoughtful in the design of my logo. Using this knowledge as well as the ARMM (Attention, Response, Meaning, Memory) model (another article about the ARMM Model to come soon), I was able to create a logo that I feel better represents my personal brand and elicits the emotions that I want my audience to feel.
Attention
In matters of grabbing a person’s attention, there are certain stimuli that we, as humans, automatically pay attention to as a result of survival tactics that date back to pre-civilization. One of those is the principle of Partially Obscured Stimuli. Using Gestalt’s principle of continuity, I used the negative space in my logo to create the letter “B” in Ryan B. Designs, to create a partially obscured stimulus to draw attention to the logo.
Response
When we look at a logo or a brand, within the first few seconds, we feel an emotional response on a subconscious level. When one understands the ways that shapes affect the viewers emotions, one can use the shapes and patterns of the logo to elicit the brand emotions. By flipping the “R” in the logo, the slant in the letter is now slanting forward eliciting a perception of movement forward, while the curvature in the “R” and “B” elicit emotions partial to collaboration, empathy, and trustworthy. The vertical lines in the center of the logo represents the credibility.
Meaning
When working with initial based logos, it can be a little difficult to convey meaning behind the logo that people can gather from looking at it for a while. Despite the challenge, I was able to use the letter “B” in the white space to represent Adaptability, while bold font for the main letters represent Confidence and the use of a San Serif font representing the Modern nature of my work.
Memory
Using the Mnemonic Device of acronyms, I made the logo my initials RB, for Ryan Brooks. This way that when people look at the logo they can easily look at it and remember the person behind the brand.
Color Theory
Using the laws of color theory (if you are unfamiliar, read my article on Color Theory in Digital) as well as my brand emotions, I chose colors in my color palette to compliment my Brand logo in eliciting the emotions of my brand.
For color inspiration, I came across the cutest picture of my dog breed here. I loved the tones and I felt that the colors that I pulled adequately represent the Ryan B. Designs brand.
Conclusion
Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with the outcome of my rebranding activities and I am confident that this brand will last me for some time. The moral to the story is that your brand elements shouldn’t be a bunch of colors and designs that you think just look cool. When thinking about your brand (for your personal brand or your company) take the time to think about who your brand is and who you want your brand to be and strategically think of how you can convey that identity through your brand look and feel. And don’t stop there! Make sure that the brand identity that you put together is conveyed through all of your content and how you publicly carry yourself!
Comment below your personal brand identity and what you want your audience to get out of it! And don’t forget to applaud the post if you like it, and if you want to see more, subscribe to my posts!
