How I Built My Personal Brand and Failed
February 19, 2021
Everyone has a Personal Brand, but most people don’t know.
Let’s see what a Personal Brand and Personal Branding is, as they frequently get confused.
A Personal Brand is what people say about you.
It’s how you’re perceived by others.
Personal branding is what you say about yourself.
It’s the process of how you market yourself to others.
A jump in the past
Here’s the story of how I built my personal brand when I started my journey as a designer.
At that time, I was just starting and I would spend all the evening sketching logos. That’s what I loved to do.
So, I started designing my logo too.
Being inspired by the projects on the internet made me think that building my personal brand would mean designing my logo.
This was my logo:
The concept I had in mind was to design a minimal logo that would contain my initials, G and L.
I think you can spot the L at most, but it’s very confusing.
The main — and biggest — issue with this logo was that it worked only in black.
When you design a logo, you have to make sure it works first in black and white because if it does, it works with any other color.
It was unbalanced.
The initial idea was to design a logo that contained my initials, where the outer stroke meant the G and the inner stroke meant the L.
Also, the stroke was too thick that it created a lot of contrast wherever you would put the logo.
A logo to work has to be simple, but that wasn’t the case.
It’s ok to be wrong, and I don’t think I could be here today if I didn’t do that mistake.
The main issue was that I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I thought that having a personal brand meant having a logo and a social media account, but I was wrong. I didn’t have any direction. But I’m glad it happened.
Everything was built around with the idea of looking good but was missing the foundations.
What I learned
I learned that failure is not a disgrace as some people say. In fact, the most successful people are the ones that fail the most.
It helped me discover my design process.
I learned that you don’t have to design your logo or your website first because you don’t need it.
Take for example Elon Musk or Gary Vaynerchuk, do they have a logo? No.
The key is not to have a logo or a website, is to be there, be present
Get it right
Some takeaways to get your Personal Brand started.
Know who you are and what you want.
You must know what you’re passionate about so that you can build something around what best represents you, in everything you do.
Do you want to help other people?
Do you want to teach?
Do you want to create content around dogs?
The possibilities are endless, you just have to discover what you’re good at.
What is your purpose and who do you want to help?
Knowing what your goal is and who you want to help it’s vital to define the direction you want to take with your Personal Brand and how you want to communicate with your audience.
If I have to give you a tip on how to get started with your personal brand is to not jump straight to the design part. How you look is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s like making a puzzle knowing that there are a lot of missing pieces.
Don’t rush the process.