The right way to brand yourself as a designer

Unfortunately, I missed this week’s class of contemporary design culture, so I decided to find an article I found interesting and something that I haven’t heard about much yet during my time as a product design student and that is Branding.

I read this article about getting your name out there and standing above most people who may wish to walk the same path as you. The writer of this blog is Deanna deBara and she raised some very valid points about how important it is to brand yourself for yourself and she explains that she has seen so many designers fall at the last hurdle. She went on to say, ‘while many designers feel confident about their ability to create killer designs, when it comes to branding themselves, they can be a little less confident.’ This gave me the impression that confidence is a huge factor in branching out and branding yourself as a designer. Deanna went on to explain five steps that she thought were the key factors to break out as a designer.

Define who you are!

This was the first step she explained how you must make something that screams I am a designer rather than straight up telling people what you do. I think this step can be overlooked by many as by stepping out and trying to brand yourself you must take into consideration what area of design you want to showcase.

Establish your POD

Pod is your point of difference this is just specifying what you are good at showcasing your work as better than everyone else and giving customers a reason to go out of their way to choose your design. This seems like an easy task, but this can get great designers upset by the fact the customers don’t start rolling in straight away.

Get niche with it

Here she talks about getting specific so when a customer looks for a logo made, they see your work first and become interested in that regard. This can be very hard to go too far and get your brand stuck in a corner I think anyway as I would say most people would specify there brand too much and get stuck in a corner with it.

Design your key branding elements

Here the main tips she gave were Typography, Brand colour palette, Logo and Website luckily for us as students of product design this step is made easier for us as we are shown how to make this during our time here at University of Limerick.

Put yourself in your client’s shoes

This tip is the most memorable after reading the article as she tells us that you should act like a consumer and reverse engineer your brand using this information that you gather. this final step is a key step as if you can’t navigate your website or shop you won’t find any customers willing to put their time and money into you.

After reading these steps I realised that it is a simple process in building a brand but it’s all to do with the final delivery and first impressions. They are the main points I took from this blog but if you want to give it a read yourself here is a link to this article

https://99designs.ie/blog/freelancing/brand-yourself-as-designer/