With the fall of sub-cultures and increase in individualism in the last two decades, personal branding has become an unavoidable element of professional development, especially in creative industries. Young professionals are being taught that details such as which font and colour they choose to write their name in on their business cards will determine their success in employability. The emphasis put on aesthetics of one’s identity and semiotics related to it are often the main focus for a lot of individuals when designing their portfolio. And righteously so.
The visual elements in our culture are so ubiquitous that often we rely on them while making important decisions. We usually talk about our first impression of something or someone based on how this something or someone is presented to us and how it makes us feel. While this is natural behaviour for most humans who are able to use their vision and brain, I feel this is also very shallow and distracts from the ‘essence’ and ideas of such thing/person.
As someone who values quality of content over visual gimmicks, I would like to focus on clear visual communication and presenting the best parts of my projects in a clear and concise way. Given the types of companies that I’m interested to work with and projects I’m interested to work on, highlighting the depth of some of the issues discussed in my projects is as important, if not more so, than just creating flashy visuals for grabbing peoples’ attention.
Please be considerate of my career choices. Although some of them may seem somewhat dull and not as creative as the others, even though my love and passion for creativity is grant. I genuinely believe that not all hobbies and skills should be monetised. As current research suggests, quite often desperately trying to make income from activities we enjoy, do for fun and/or to destress, results in burn-out and decreased overall work satisfaction. Long story short, some of our creative activities should be left for what they are (fun), especially if you’re as neurotic and anxious as me. Aside from this, I also believe that satisfaction and happiness come from doing meaningful work that contributes to society, and not always from pursuing my wildest of dreams.
In this significant moment of my career and professional development, I wish to stand for my values as well as prepare for different scenarios and options in my looking-for-job-after-graduation quest. My versatility and range of skills can be lost in a visual clutter, that is why I’m considering more subtle design options for my personal brand.
With this in mind, I created simple yet strong personal branding guidelines for my online presence and printed promotional materials. So, without further ado, I’m presenting it to you below!
From my own experience in graphic design and branding, creating branding guidelines is a great way of always knowing how the brand’s assets should look like. By limiting my design choices, staying on the right visual path is easier and created graphics are more consistent.
For a period of time now I had quite strong feelings towards a particular font – Barlow Condensed. I was a graphics intern at Graduate Fashion Foundation when lead graphic designer proposed this font to be a new branding for GFW19 event. It came with bold and colourful Swiss design elements and working with it was a pure joy for me. I instantly understood the branding guideline and was able to create digital and printed graphics following it.
For this wishy-washy reason I decided to use this font for my personal branding. And the more I types my name in this font the more I felt like this is the one for me – it’s bold but somehow elegant and slightly distorted, can you see the similarities already?
(By the way, I did experiment with other fonts, however I felt the strongest about Barlow Condensed).
WEBSITE
OLD – I created my website as part of my preparation for placement at the end of second year of this course. For the AD396 Portfolio Promotion project, I updated my website with most recent work, I deleted a lot of old, irrelevant work, and made sure the design reflects my new branding guidelines.
The layout of the page remains the same, however, I change the heading’s fonts. Below is the old header.
It goes together with other assets, such as my CV and mini portfolio. I decided to use traditional but chic (don’t you think it looks like Vogue font?!) typography design, because I was trying to land a placement within fashion industry.
That’s so 2018-me though, and a lot of things changed since then.
NEW – Because I’m not restricting myself to fashion industry anymore (I was only applying for the placements in fashion), and my skills and knowledge can be applied to many different professional areas (local pubs, supermarkets, charities, cafés and even hospitals – all of these places rely on visual promotion and communication).
But we all know I’m not about corporate design – far from it! I love to experiment and apply unconventional methods to my designs and have fun with all visual, as well as communicating the purpose. That’s why I decided to use colour RED instead of keeping it black and grey (as in old branding).
As mentioned above, I consider myself multi-disciplined professional, and my work experience reflects this. I have body of work consisting of moving-image and illustration, graphic design, and branding, as well as event organisation, social media managing, and digital editing. Most of my projects have different aesthetics (mainly because a lot of it was done for a client). By keeping my personal branding bold but minimal I can avoid wasting time on desperately trying to make everything fit next to each other. The clever consistency of fonts and colours used to present the work, will tie everything together, while demonstrating variety of skills and experience.
I created a full version of my portfolio, with all my best and most relevant work to date. It divides by disciplines, so it will be easily adaptable, if I’m applying for more specific positions. By updating page 2 (content) and deleting few pages I can quickly create more a new versions of the portfolio, tailored to specific employers.
My office experience and other professional, but not creative skills are highlighted in my CV (eva kubacka cv 2020), and when applying for this type of job, composing a strong cover letter is more important than a portfolio.
I also created different versions of a business card. Focusing on key professional pathways I would like to take.
I created fun and colourful designs as well as one generic business card.
