Design your way

Personal logo design may seem the easiest thing at first, but you may soon discover that you are your most difficult client.

When you’re a designer, crafting branding masterpieces for clients leaves little time to think of your own promotion.

Yet, a good personal brand logo is something you can’t dismiss if you want people to know about you.

Personal logos are, in fact, the key elements of your brand identity.

As someone who’s mastered this art, you have the ability to manipulate all important building blocks, and bring those together in a unique piece that reflects who you truly are. With a personal logo design, you can proudly share your work with potential clients, colleagues, and employers.

Give your personal brand an identity

Personal logo designs help professionals build up their reputation, and showcase the personality of their work. They use logos to let customers know the niche in which they operate, the specific design trends they follows, and the unique aspects of their work. Consider how you want to be perceived as a designer.

Once you’ve chosen the style of your logo, you’ve determined the branding direction for all other promotional materials, including your business card, resume, portfolios, social media pages, and even user icons. In a single tiny visual package you’ll be showing the world who you are, and what you’re doing the best.

You should of course look at the work of other designers and get inspired, but once you get down to your work, you must think of designing a personal logo different from anything customers have ever seen.

While creating a personal logo, start by making your name (or initials) clearly visible, and memorable for both clients and employers. Next, think of a way to associate them with the unique set of skills you’re trying to sell to your audience.

Speaking of skills, you need to select a limited number and emphasize them in the right way, as for instance your ability to work with industrial equipment, or the experience serving a particular industry.

You can also include an image in your personal logo, and add the text afterwards, as long as the image gets down to the point (do your customers really care about your personal hobbies, and how do hobbies show them you’re qualified for the job?).

With personal logos, less is more. Personal logos designs should be understandable and simple, and get the job done without excess wording and detailing. You don’t need too many colours or fonts put up together, as this may hide the message you’re conveying, and make customers struggle to understand it.

One or two colors will suffice for an intricate logo design, and will make it much easier to replicate the work on other promotional materials.

So, how to design a personal logo? To make the process easier for you, we collated some of the best tips, tricks, and personal logo ideas from around the world, and listed them in a handy guide. Check it out:

Make your personal logo design unique

Looking at the best personal logo designs, we’d all arrive to the same conclusion – these masterworks are unique! Even when working with their bare initials (which, of course, happen to be many people’s initials), talented designers found a way to inject their creative personality, and the market appreciated that in no time.

To do the same, you have to think out of the box, and focus on the things that make your brand memorable.

Doodle

A heads-up: It will take to prepare and dismiss multiple personal logo examples before you scratch on the final product. In the meanwhile, all ideas and suggestions are welcomed, while the pressure of reinventing the wheel is not.

Doodling is a great way to launch your creative journey, as this way you’ll have all ideas documented on paper, and you’ll be a step closer to the ideal logo with every sketch you make.

Stay flexible

A good designer knows there’s always room for improvement. This means you should give your logo a try on different backgrounds and in different settings, and scale it up and down for maximal visibility. It may turn out that a simple black and white logo is the best option you’ve got!

Another challenge for a designer in charge will be to create a logo that looks equally well wherever it appears, which means the designs should be adaptable, and look nicely on all sorts of branding materials. We remind you once again: The simplest ideas often turn out to be the best ones!

Build up your own reputation

Personal logo designs are very individualized pieces of work, and have the sole task of conveying what a designer stands for. Rather than rethinking the entire purpose of life and figuring out your values, you should build up a picture of yourself customers would like to see.

The process comes quite close to adjusting your clothing to your personality: you will either opt for a relaxed and casual combination, or a sophisticated piece that will make your look elegant and formal. It all comes down to collecting visual, written, and verbal adjustments, and combining them in a distinct perception.

Familiarize with your audience and your competitors

Launching a design career is pretty much the same as starting up any type of business – you have to target an audience for your services, and get to know what they want so that you can provide it.

While there is nothing wrong with working on your own ideas and developing unique concepts, you should always keep track of who’s going to see them, and how they’d feel about them.

Collect information and craft the profile of an ideal consumer – who he is, what he likes or dislikes, what he stands for, and which brands he’s already associated with. This will help you put a face to your prospective customers, and respond to their exact requirements.

Don’t forget that your competitors also have a role in building up this profile. Which are the best brands in your surroundings, and how do customers usually associate with them?

Are there any designers whose style and skills are similar to yours, and which are the weaknesses you could use to your advantage? Quite often, a competitor’s analysis will reveal the answer of which market gap you’re supposed to close.

Double-meaning logos

This won’t be easy to explain with words, but the best personal logo designs are the ones that have double, or even triple meaning. To give you he clear picture, we will use an example: a logo that contains the word ‘pause’ written in plain letters could get a whole new meaning by using two parallel lines instead of the letter ‘u’ (the video-player symbol for a pause).

These clever inventions are quite common in successful logos, and you should be thinking of one of your own.

Use it as much as you can

A properly designed personal logo will underline your reputation of a professional designer, which is why you need it showcased on all your working assets and materials.

Place it on top of the resume, feature it on each page in your portfolio, and print business cards with it. Better yet, make sure employers spot it easily on social media, and this will help you make a lasting impression.

Start with a creative brief

When creating a personal logo, think of yourself as any other client you’ve worked with. Don’t jump headfirst into your task, but think of the brand identity first, and set the town in line with your audiences’ needs. Research your competitors, and keep track of your budget so that your project won’t go out of control.

Getting inspired

You can find logo inspiration literally everywhere, starting with competing brands in the industry and moving to all types of web collections you come across. Yet, the best shot you’ve got is to look at yourself and what you stand for, and try to depict that hidden meaning you wish customers would know about.

Ending thoughts on personal logo design

Coming up with an attractive logo is the ultimate task of every professional designer. Personal logos are critical parts of every branding strategy, and are used to communicate both the skills and the quality of work that designer has to offer.

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