VISUALISE THE ESSENCE OF YOUR IDENTITY
How can you communicate who you are to the people relevant to you? How can you express it even if you are not talking to them in person? This section wants to suggest your visual identity can do much of that for you.
Your visual identity comprises all visible elements of your work identity: name or logo, fonts and colours applied to your stationery (business card and email signature, letterhead, etc.), presentation templates (for PowerPoint or Keynote), blog and/or website and profiles on social network sites. Your office, its design and architecture, should also be part of your visual identity. The same applies to your physical appearance. Actually everything counts, online and offline, that visually communicates who you are, what you do and why it should matter to mindsetspecific peers.
Your visual identity is an essential part of the process of creative personal branding that enables you to build your reputation and enhance your profile.
To create a strong and efficient brand you need to apply it consistently across all of your communication. Put passion and enthusiasm into it and you will get your investment of emotional and intellectual energy back in a big way. Why is visual communication so powerful? Well, our brain responds more strongly to visual communication and this therefore adds an extra dimension to your verbal credentials.
Once you have developed your visual identity you can spend your time improving and updating content rather than developing another template and hunting for the right font each time you need to give a presentation. One more suggestion: remember when I mentioned that creativity is very social? So is your visual identity. Even if you are good at it, you need another point of view. Ask a professional designer to help you with it. Yes, it will cost you money. But it’s worth it. It will guarantee a better result, be more efficient and will definitely look more professional.
Let’s start with your logo. Your logo means your identity, your speech and your meaning. The logo and especially the logotype (a stylized type) should give your peers the possibility to identify you and differentiate you from your competitors.
Your font is also very important. Historically there are two different types, serif typefaces such as Garamond or Bodoni, or sans serif typefaces such as Univers, Helvetica or Futura. Today you have many new and visually pleasing types. But a word of caution: be aware of how to use them. I was lucky to be taught typography by pedantic teachers trained and influenced by the philosophy of the Bauhaus, the modernist architecture and design movement founded by Walter Gropius and later directed by Mies van der Rohe and the Swiss School of Typography, often known as the Swiss Style — now you now why the typeface is called Helvetica. They forced us to reconstruct a print-ready version of an entire alphabet — Bauer Bodoni — by hand in black and white, working it out from only three given letters. This was based on our capacity to see, understand and reconstruct the form and especially the proportion between black and white. This zen-like meditational work trains you to see the beauty and aesthetics of a well-designed logotype, poster or book.
Colour is important too. It tells a lot about you, it evokes emotion and creates strong brand recognition. Maybe you have already been given a specific colour or two from your peers in your feedback test? That would be great. If not just go to your wardrobe and see what kind of colours you have there. Normally just two or three. If you are interested, read books about colours and their significance. There is a lot of literature on the subject, from Harald Küppers’ The Basic Law of Colour Theory, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours to work on colours in psychology.
Finally come the slogan and the images you put with your identity. A slogan is a memorable and motivational tagline. Just remember Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’. It has a lot to do with your mission statement and purpose. Express your core values. we can take great photographs like Helmut Newton (helmutnewton.com), Terry Richardson (terrysdiary.com) or Mario Testino (mariotestino.com). That’s not true. Many of the people around me have lots of pictures but, I’m sorry to say, at least 80% are not good, not even close to good. One rule on images. A consistent use of images can help you to connect to your peers and clients. Think about using a professional photographer or your designer.
