Why a Personal Brand is a Must
Creating a personal brand can be crucial to create a breakthrough in your career.
When we’re recently released into the working force or when we discover we want to work on our own, it is hard to navigate this new and unknown world. Besides building a beautiful portfolio in any design field, creating a personal brand can be crucial to create a breakthrough in your career. It can take you from someone with little to no experience to someone that at least appears to know what they’re doing.
Creating your personal brand pushes you to define who you are and where you want to go regarding your career. In this world, it is not very effective to appear to know everything and to try to be everyone. The best thing you can do is to focus, define who you’re talking to, what kind of projects you would like to have in the future and what types of clients. It’s fair enough to work for money, but if that project isn’t oriented to what you want to do it’s not worth making it a part of your brand. In other words, do not show it.
Showcase the work that you want to keep on doing and if you don’t have any then create it. Projects don’t have to be real, especially when we’re just taking off, the point is to show your skills, style and to let everyone know who you are and want to be. Being authentic is fundamental, transmitting this to your target audience is also key. Today, doing this through multiple social media channels is within everyone’s reach. So take advantage of these tools and tell your story while spreading out your work.
Becoming an expert on something and just focusing on that can be very powerful and remarkable. Don’t be afraid of being extremely specific, in this realm this is a lot more appreciated than you can imagine. Anyone within the design field can do a logo, choose typography and select a color palette. But what happens when you just focus on one little thing, like lettering for murals? All you do is paint pretty words on big walls. But you’re the best doing this and you let everyone know. Another example would be botanical illustration, as limiting this may sound there are many opportunities, like scientific book illustration, packaging, tattoo artist, and so on, plus people are always on the hunt for specialists.
Being consistent with your brand will help you to stand out from everyone else. It’s a combination of your skills, experience, and personality and how you portray yourself to the professional world. Of course, for the workforce in the design field, this might seem pretty evident, but there’s a huge lack of it. If you want to stand out from the crowd in social media, while applying to a job or just for freelance a personal brand will take you there. As a designer have fun with it, create your logo, choose your colors and make sure it all represents who you are.