In this article I want to tell you about the importance of having a personal brand, a logo with your own name.

You should also be aware of its most frequent uses and the universe of possibilities and benefits it offers to promote and/or sell your activities, ventures or services in increasingly accessible and competitive media.

What is a personal brand?

A personal brand is a logo that speaks about you in the first person, and therefore bears your name, as if you were your own product, your own company.

A personal brand logo is a visual representation of your unique identity and professional personality.

Personal branding gives your name meaning and value to other people, and this considerably increases your chances of being “chosen” either within your environment or in a specific market in which you are interested in participating.

The visual power of a personal brand makes your name easily remembered and identified among many others.

It is proven that people recognize icons and visual signals very easily.

If we apply this concept to the signage that we see in our daily lives, we all know that if we see a sign with a drawing of an airplane, it is indicating that it is an airport, and so on with many others.

We respond easily to visual stimuli, and graphic design, and especially logo design, thrives on that.

You can read my article “The most complete guide to understanding logos” for more information.

>>> I WANT MY PERSONAL BRAND <<<

Let's talk about Branding

I don't want to go into too much detail about branding because that's not the purpose of this article, but I will mention some basic concepts so that you understand that designing a logo is not just about making a pretty drawing.

A logo is a “brand”, YOUR BRAND! that can become very powerful if you know how to manage it with judgment and professionalism.

Branding, also known as brand management, is made up of a set of actions related to the positioning, purpose and values ​​of a brand.

Its goal is to create conscious and unconscious connections with the public to influence their purchasing decisions.

The most common types of branding are:

• the product branding
• the service's
• the corporative's
• the personal's

Personal Branding

Personal Branding is the management of your personal brand, acting and positioning yourself in such a way that your audience clearly understands who you are and what you offer.

That is, you must know exactly what you want to be remembered for and work to design that image for your audience, and this is precisely what you have to agree with your graphic designer.

It is the way you present yourself, the way others perceive you, your style, your intentions, your personality, what you say and what you do.

These are the ingredients that make up your personal brand and, in other words, the lens through which others see you, both personally and professionally.

Why have a personal brand?

Maybe you have ever wondered why you should have a personal brand if you are not a company, a product or a service.

Having a personal brand does not necessarily mean having to identify yourself as a commercial, corporate or institutional entity, although it is true that every good brand responds to the design of corporate identity as such, with its usage regulations perfectly established.

A personal brand doesn't have to be something cold and devoid of emotions, sensitivity or personality, since in reality it is quite the opposite.

In fact, a personal brand serves to say "Here I am, this is who I am!" and often represents your essence, your personality, the activity you carry out or what you produce and want to make known, but always with your unique and personal seal.

Entering the digital universe of screens

A personal brand today is closely linked to the digital world and without it it is almost impossible to ensure entry and belonging in these media.

In these times when a large part of our existence is spent on screens connected to the Internet through websites, social networks, streaming channels, influencers and YouTubers, people increasingly need to identify themselves in order to distinguish themselves from their peers.

That is why designing a personal brand is important to have a relevant identity that allows you to remain in the media leaving your own mark.

Uses of personal brands

Who should use personal brands?

Podríamos resumir diciendo que las marcas personales son aquellas que representan entidades con nombres de personas (y no nombres de fantasía) que desarrollan alguna actividad o servicio, tales como profesionales, artistas, emprendimientos familiares, etc.

Y es así que encontramos logos de abogados, estudios contables, músicos y otros, pero siempre se trata de personas físicas reales, con nombre y apellido.

On the other hand, although we all know countless commercial brands with proper names, these brands do not represent people but commercial products that are for sale.

Many of them were probably born as personal brands backed by the good name of their creators, but they have evolved and created fame until they became registered trademarks, exponents of quality, luxury and international prestige.

When fame means prestige

Many of the clothing brands we know have been born from the design workshops of their creators who decided to put their signature, their own name, on them, and so they remain current over the years, even when these people have ceased to exist, and have now become international franchises.

You probably know the brands Pierre Cardin, Versace or Louis Vuitton, and you will tell me that they are personal brands that come from the names of real people, but... Do you know the faces of these people?

When you buy a Versace suit you are not buying a personal creation of Gianni Versace, you are buying the prestige of his brand.

What I mean is that if you go to a store to buy one of those products, you don't have direct contact with its creator; in fact, most of them have already passed away or don't live in your city.

Types of personal brands

Within the typology of brands there are basically 3 types of logos that adapt perfectly to individuals who use their own name as brands.

These types are: Initial, Monogram and Signature, which I will explain very briefly below.

Initial

The brand is represented only by the first letter of its name and can have an element that contains it (a square, a circle, etc.)

Monogram

The word monogram comes from the Greek "monos" which means "alone, unique, isolated" and "gramma" which means "engraved, written"

The monogram is a logo variable and applies to brands that use two or three initials as an abbreviation, and may (or may not) be used in conjunction with a logo.

They generally correspond to the name and surname of people or the initials of the words that make up the name of a company.

It's not just about single characters.

They are graphically combined through a design, interlacing the features of some letters with others, to form a sign fused into a single unit like a seal.

Signature

It consists of creating a logo from a person's handwritten signature.

It is generally applied to very famous personalities whose own name has become a registered trademark.

This is the case of great fashion designers, musicians, film and sports stars.

This is not exclusive since there are many famous brands that use other typologies such as logos, imagotypes or isologos.

You can read my article “The most complete guide to understanding logos” for more information.

“Personalized” personal brand

Whenever we design a personal brand we must not forget that we are designing for a “person” who has emotions, feelings, expectations, dreams, goals and objectives to achieve with that brand.

Empathizing with that person is essential to understanding our creative work and achieving our client’s goals. That is why the word “personalized” takes on a fundamental value in this case.

So we design for people, not just users. A user is just a number.

For example, the number of followers you have on your social networks, where you don't identify them one by one but the total number that grows and grows in your favor, but perhaps you don't even know many of them, and that's why those people become "depersonalized."

We are persons, not numbers

The above is a statistical and abstract term, and while it gives you prestige to have a large number of followers on your channel or social networks who give you their likes, that does not identify you and does not guarantee that you really are who you claim to be.

Instead, “a person” is about the person and their behaviors, their emotions, expectations, their own universe, and that is where we must focus and empathize.

That is why a good personal brand should reflect in its concept some personal aspect that identifies that person and what they want to communicate through their own name.

The power of a good personal brand

I would like to tell you briefly about the personal brand of Hauser, a virtuoso cellist of Croatian nationality.

Hauser is a prime example of an artist who knows how to put his personal brand to good use.

He is very careful about his image and flaunts his somewhat eccentric personality.

In his live performances he personally takes care of all the details, as he himself makes the musical arrangements, edits his videos, stages his shows and manages his website and social networks.

He has undoubtedly managed to turn his name, his art and his personality into a true trademark, knowing how to make the most of the image of his personal brand.

Smart Choices

Hauser chooses to use only his last name for his brand, as his name Stjepan, like most Eastern European names, is very difficult to pronounce in other countries where he develops his professional career, and on the contrary, his last name Hauser is pronounced the same way in almost all languages.

His logo is very simple, a capitalized typeface with only its outline, so that it can be placed over the images on the covers of his albums and promotional pieces.

The fact that the logo is not filled, just outline, does not detract from the images, which are always excellent quality photos.

In some versions, it adds the silhouette of a cello to the letter H, which reinforces its concept of identity and favors its use as an avatar on social networks and YouTube videos.

Something to say…

Still a very young artist (born in 1986 in Pula, Croatia), he has had an international professional career spanning more than 20 years.

Hauser knew from the beginning what he wanted to do with his art, taking the cello to very high levels of virtuosity and bringing that instrument closer to ordinary people through very diverse musical repertoires and settings.

"My passion is to show the world the versatility of the cello," Hauser says on his website.

His personal brand is always with him, not only on the covers of his albums and advertisements but also in the stage designs of his concerts.

All this history and curious facts that I mentioned to you about Hauser is a pretext… 

Yes, it is an excuse to tell you that this is what a good graphic designer needs to know when empathizing with the client to create a personal brand, or any other similar project.

We must always know who we are designing for, and we must not be afraid to ask and talk politely with our client, in order to obtain all the information necessary to achieve a successful work.

When typefaces give identity

There are many commercial fonts that have the power to communicate ideas or concepts through their strokes or features, and as designers we can use them to give identity and personality to the brands we create.

While it is true that many of them were created by great designers for a specific logo, the design of their alphabet allows them to be applied in totally different projects.

Many times a typeface speaks for itself and does not need any other element to complement it to convey the message it intends to give.

The following examples are excellent examples of fonts that communicate characteristics of the people they represent.

Picasso

The “Picasso” logo is a clear example of the good use of typographic fonts.

Although the brand refers to a model of the Citroën car brand and not to the person of the Spanish plastic artist Pablo Picasso, it makes direct reference to the painter due to the concept that the Citroën brand wanted to give to these car models.

The Brush typeface makes a clear reference to the painter's brushstrokes.

But what if the logo designer had chosen a different font? Would we still associate the name of the car with the painter?

I suggest you analyze other cases that refer to famous people known worldwide for their works.

Here the typefaces and the graphic treatment applied to them directly represent the outstanding characteristics of the people to whom the brand name refers.

Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) was a great Catalan architect, creator of numerous monumental works in Barcelona (Spain), such as the temple of the Sagrada Familia, Parc Güell, Batlló House, among others.

One of the main characteristics of Gaudí's work, and which is repeated in all of them, is undoubtedly the use of a technique of his creation called trencadís, which consists of designing multicoloured textured coverings from fragments of discarded ceramics.

The word trencadís in Catalan means "broken" or "chopped."

This trencadís concept is transferred to the design of a large number of logos related to the person of Gaudí, his city and his art.

The mere invocation of the name Gaudí brings to mind that mental image of colorful scraps, since it is his identity, his main feature, his trademark, and also that of the city of Barcelona.

In these cases, it is not the typeface itself that conveys the brand concept, but rather the segmentation and color treatment given to it, simulating the characteristic trencadís, associated with a name that is very strongly embedded in people's memory.

Gaudí means trencadís, Gaudí means Catalan modernism, Gaudí means Barcelona.

Kandinsky

Here we can see other examples of personal brands inspired by famous people, which make direct reference to the Russian visual artist Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the great masters of abstract art.

In this case, with much more extreme designs than the previous ones.

It is not the typeface or its artistic treatment that gives identity to the brand, but the design of its alphabets that use characteristic forms taken from the painter's works and his own unique and unmistakable style.

Brands that leave “marks”

Surely we all remember the Walt Disney character “Zorro” and his unmistakable mark of the Z, drawn in countless places with his skillful sword and always leaving his mark, as if saying “Zorro was here!”, accompanied by a voice that said Zorro!

And it is not just any letter Z, it is “that Zeta”, which is always the same, with the same design… that is called IDENTITY.

Art is work

“Art is work” the great New York graphic designer Milton Glaser (1929-2020) told us

As usual in my posts, I like to share first-hand experiences from real cases with my clients.

Such is the following example of Gisela García-Gleria, an Argentine visual artist and composer, who actively participates in numerous exhibitions and events, both her own and collective shows, in Argentina and abroad.

Since the beginning of her professional career, I have created graphics for exhibitions and events, designing flyers, banners, video clips and other promotional media.

Knowing the client

It is very important that the designer and the client form a team with specific objectives, getting to know each other and contributing creative ideas that allow the development of valuable products.

Gisela is a great creator, an inexhaustible source of new projects, and all of them need the professional vision of a creative designer to materialize these ideas in the best possible way.

In the following images you can see the artist’s first solo exhibition held in Buenos Aires in 2018, called “Reborn in Epecuén”, with simple promotional graphics consisting of a banner and flyers, where the work prevails over the artist’s identity, and at that time, that was what we needed…

The need to design an identity

A year later, in 2019, Gisela began to have a more prominent presence by holding large solo exhibitions in important venues in Buenos Aires and the interior of the country, such as the «Free Spirit» exhibition, which presents works inspired by Scotch whisky and Argentine wineries and vineyards.

The volume of his work begins to grow notably with more than 140 artworks exhibited at each event, and the need to show them beyond the exhibitions leads me to suggest that he design his own website.

It was the right time to reverse the previous equation, where this time the artist is the one who presents her works and must highlight her identity through her art.

This time the promotional graphics consist of several flyers with different artworks, a personal card and a video clip that is projected at the event.

First things first

As always, before designing a website I advise my clients to have a good logo, a brand that represents them and strengthens their identity, and Gisela has immediately accepted my proposal.

Just as if it were a company, the design of a brand allows us to “order” the content and establish patterns of graphic communication, always maintaining coherence and criteria in the designs, and providing an “added value” that allows it to stand out from its peers, and this is precisely what designing an “identity”, a personal brand, is about.

And what better way to give identity to a brand than to use your own name.

Finding the brand concept

What does a name suggest to us?

The case of Gisela García-Gleria has the particularity that both her name and her surname begin with the letter G, and that is why I decided on the typological option of “Initial” with said letter to develop the concept of her personal brand.

Maybe if her name had different initials I would have chosen a monogram or a signature, but the curious repetition of the G was confirming my decision to use it as an initial.

Furthermore, Gisela is often politely called by the abbreviation of her name: “Gi”, just as the letter G in English /dzi/ sounds phonetically.
This is not a whim or coincidence, since she develops a large part of her artistic activity oriented around the theme of Scotch whisky, and that is why I took advantage of this little linguistic game as a subliminal element that adds value to the brand, and both her website and her social media posts are bilingual: in Spanish and English.

Search for elements that define the identity of the person

When empathizing with the person and defining their main qualities, I wanted to give the initial G the characteristics of the artist's personality and the activity that she develops, and therefore, the letter is drawn with a brushstroke, as a gestural and spontaneous stroke.

The brush synthesizes the medium through which the artist develops her work and expresses herself; and applied to her own name represents her autograph, her signature, her guarantee of authenticity, her personal imprint.

It is completed using as a color fill one of his works consisting of an abstract texture with colors that will later allow creating palettes for the different applications of the brand.

The colors of the website's headlines and secondary elements respond to that color palette.

The brand also has enough semantic strength to be identified completely devoid of color and textures, both positive and negative, since the shape of the stroke speaks for itself.

Create communication criteria

Once the brand has been developed, with its respective user manual where the design standards are established: color palette, typographic fonts, brand placements, size and readability variables, etc., we are in a position to develop and create all the media we need.

From now on, the “G” of Gisela will be our new Z of Zorro and will identify all of its artistic manifestations.

We already have the necessary elements to design your personal website www.giselagarciagleria.com.ar, where your complete catalog of works, biography, agenda of activities, press releases, personal blog and online store to acquire your art objects are displayed.

Strengthening brand presence

The brand has an isotype made up of the letter G as a responsive logo, which is the minimum expression of the brand's presence in digital media, forming the avatar of the website and social networks, which allow its presence to be quickly identified, as well as identifying products in the online store.

Breaking new ground

Once the brand, website and social media have been designed, we can create other printed graphic elements that complement them.

Because not everything is virtual and there is still a “tangible” world beyond the screens, which allows people to carry a little bit of us in their pockets, as well as many other elements that make up physical spaces.

And so personal cards, flyers, banners and posters for exhibitions and events emerge, complementing digital promotion.

The true value of being original

My personal proposal for Gisela is to “design everything that can be designed” and apply her brand to various media that give identity and originality to her works.

And when I talk about originality I say it in the strictest sense of the word, since the artist proposes “original, unique and unrepeatable works”, and the possibility of acquiring them and certifying that condition of originality.

This is how I have designed the certificates of authenticity of the works that are given to those who acquire his paintings.

Each of them is personalized according to the work, reporting its technical characteristics, history of the work, name of the buyer and handwritten signature of the artist.

Therefore, each certificate is also unique and unrepeatable.

The artist offers the possibility of acquiring limited edition art objects in her online store, personalized with her works, autographed and identified with packaging and self-adhesive labels carefully designed with her brand.

Always prioritize identity

Labels identify a work of art within the space of an exhibition, indicating the name of the work, its author and its technical characteristics.

Taking advantage of the fact that each of the artist's works is published on her website, I have proposed designing personalized labels with QR codes that lead directly to the page of each painting on the website, providing more information to the visitor of the exhibition.

In this way, the virtual is integrated with the physical and the identity of the artist and her brand is strengthened, creating added value of interactivity to the experience of attending an exhibition.

This original feature has been very well received by the exhibition attendees and has encouraged traffic to the website, improving SEO and web positioning.

And almost without realizing it, we began to enter people's perception, establishing the presence of a personal brand that represents an artist and her work.

Final conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article and understood the importance of having a personal brand and the possibilities that open up from it.

You have already seen the universe of elements that can be derived from a well-designed brand, strengthening your presence in print and digital media, giving credibility and solidity to your ventures.

But above all, providing identity, that essential gift that belongs to you and no one else, just as you would do yourself, showing the world who you are, your essence and your values ​​when you cannot be physically present to express yourself.

Therefore, a personal brand is an identity that “travels” to infinite places through the web or printed on cards, stationery stores or catalogs.

The identity that a personal brand gives you is precisely that: transcending the boundaries of what is possible, what is real, what exists, what is physical and what is virtual, taking your name to places you cannot reach, and still being present and saying who you are.

That is the value of your brand, your footprint, your signal.

If you want to have your own personal brand and you consider me to be a suitable professional, do not hesitate to contact me.

In the Related Posts section below, you will find some articles with specific topics that complement the one you just read.
I invite you to read them, share them and leave your comments if you wish.
Thank you very much.

>>> I WANT MY PERSONAL BRAND <<<