Creating a Brand Identity and How to Brand Yourself

Your brand identity is a crucial tool for establishing who you are and how your audience and customers relate to you. The look and feel of your website portfolio or business branding—from your logo and typography to the packaging and customer experience style you choose—can both attract and influence collectors, customers and clients.

The more cohesive and consistent your brand identity is, the easier it is for others to understand and connect with your company. When creating a brand identity, you need to carefully select visuals and content to represent you, and maintain a consistent style and tone to support your business’ brand.

Whether you are a freelancer looking to design a website to market yourself or a fashion designer showcasing your new clothing line, building a brand identity should be the first step on every creative’s journey. 

What Goes Into Building a Brand Identity?

This varies, based on your industry and what work you’re doing, product you’re making or service you’re providing, but, generally speaking, brand identity is a combination of the following:

The words:

• Clear purpose and positioning
• Brand name
• Consistent tone and voice

The look:

• Logo and graphics
• Typography
• Color palette
• Portfolio Website
• Interior design (your studio, storefront or office)
• Packaging

The social media presence:

• Instagram and Instagram Stories
• Snapchat
• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Facebook Live
• YouTube
• Bluesky
• Twitter (X)

Ready to brand yourself? Let’s get started!

Convey a Clear Purpose and Positioning

This is the most important step in creating a brand identity; your purpose, values, goals, and audience should be clear from the start. This process can be long and challenging, and requires a lot of careful thought and research.

Why? A successful creator knows, inside and out, who they are and who they are trying to reach. Every branding decision should be made with your potential clients and customers in mind. For example, a logo geared towards millennials would look very different from a logo geared toward zoomers. The colors, the font, and the language should be intended to speak to your core audience. Remember, when it comes to brand strategy, if you try to reach everyone, you end up reaching no one.

Some useful questions to ask yourself in the process:

• How would you visualize your own personality? What colors do you associate with yourself/your work? Are you trendy and modern, or classic and professional? Figuring out what kind of person you are is crucial in determining how to brand yourself.
• What is my value proposition? What are you offering to your audience in return for their time, money, or commitment? If you’re starting a DIY channel on YouTube, for example, your value proposition might be weekly videos that teach you how to upcycle furniture on a budget.
• Who is my competition? Research potential competitors—every brand has them. Even if your product or service is revolutionary and one-of-a-kind, you are still competing for the consumer’s time, and will have competitors who are also after this precious commodity. Find a unique way to define your brand that will set you apart.

Determine Your Brand Name and Tagline

If you are branding yourself and your own skills and talents—let’s say you’re an illustrator or freelance graphic designer—your own name will do! If your brand has more than one founder or you just want an original name, think of what you want to accomplish with the brand. Do you want it to be straightforward and descriptive, or inventive and eye-catching?

Avoid mistakes such as overly long or hard-to-spell names, or ones that may cause confusion when searching because they’re too common.

Keep website domains and social media profiles in mind, since you’ll need to purchase a website domain and claim all social media handles for your brand’s name. Inconsistent social media handles can confuse your audience and make you harder to find.

Brainstorming should never be done alone, especially when creating a brand! Recruit friends, family members, and survey as many people as you can. Play word-association games to spark up new ideas for names, slogans or taglines—all of which will help with the visualization of your brand identity.

Before going too far, or growing too attached to a name, custom domain or even a logo, check first to see if it’s taken. Don’t despair, if it is, refresh and get back to new ideas.

Design a Great Logo

The logo is the central visual element of your brand identity. It is used on your website, client and customer communications, social media—everywhere. That’s why it’s so important to create a logo that meets these key criteria:

• Timeless
• Simple
• Memorable
• Versatile
• Appropriate

Many people think the logo is the most important part of creating a brand identity. (Just think of the McDonald’s golden arches; it is the most recognized logo in the world, playing an integral role in its brand image since the 1940s!) A logo is important, but it is only a piece of the overall package.

Do you want your logo to be an image? Or the name of your brand? Or a combination of the two? What style are you going for? 

Here’s some inspiration on how to create the perfect logo for you with plenty of great examples.

Choose the Right Typography

Typography may seem like a simple component of the overall brand identity, but it can be tricky to find just the right font to fit your brand and convey your story.

Every font has its own personality, even to the untrained eye. With such a wide variety to choose from, there’s some things to keep in mind:

• Avoid the gimmicky fonts—Comic Sans, Papyrus…
• Stick to two to three font families for a cohesive look: one for your display font, and one or two for the body.
• Make sure it’s easily readable—Above all, good typography provides the best user experience possible.
• Does your font match your audience? 
• You can’t go wrong with a more timeless look. Occasionally, certain fonts start trending in pop culture. If you want your brand identity to have a longer lifespan than one album cycle, avoid trendy typefaces and stick to classic, clean, and timeless fonts.

Remember: When it comes to brand development, well-chosen and consistent typography is a big part of cohesive communication and brand recognition.

Pick Your Color Palette

You’re starting to get the picture now, right? (Pun admittedly intended.) Visual elements are key in conveying meaning and emotion, and color is a weighty element in this formula. Green is a natural, fresh, color that represents growth, while red conveys urgency, passion, and excitement. The colors you choose for your branding should reflect your brand’s purpose and intent.

Narrow in on:

• What values or attributes do you want to represent? Which shades best reflect your personality or company? If your niche is, say, gentle newborn photography, soft pastel colors representing youth and serenity would be more fitting than a wild fuschia or somber olive.
• What colors are generally associated with your genre of work? For example, food and finance are often associated with green hues.
• What combination is aesthetically pleasing and complementary? When expressing your succinct image-story, what is too much contrast, and what is not enough?

These unique, memorable color palettes can inspire you and help you make some headway your own.

Select the Right Iconography, Graphics, and Images

Icons, visual symbols, and photographs form a large part of brand development.

You may notice that large brands that show bio photos either for internal or external use will typically share a cohesive look. Strict style guidelines are not uncommon to aesthetically mindful companies.

Creating your own will keep you on course when creating or introducing new elements or content.

Build Your Website

Your website is the central hub for key information about your brand. Here you have the opportunity to include more detail than you would on social media; providing a thorough biography and work samples, plus links to all your affiliated platforms.

The tone of your website should always be authentic. If you want to boost traffic and are considering bringing in external content creators (to write blog entries, for example), make sure they receive extensive training in not only the basics of your business’ value proposition and market positioning, but the tone and voice of your business’ brand. Your audience will always know when content doesn’t feel true to your brand identity.

Your website is your online portfolio, and its layout and design are just as important as the displayed samples of your work. While building your website and choosing a theme, think of your website’s homepage as your business card or resume—does it stand out? Are your key achievements easy to find and review? Does it convey your style and personality?

Wearing multiple hats and unsure of how to brand yourself? If you’re a graphic designer/illustrator/front-end developer, for example, fear not: these skills are related enough to share the same website, since their market is likely the same. But make sure to group your work samples by profession; organizing your content appropriately ensures that the right audience can find exactly what they’re looking for.

Create Great Signage

If your brand has a retail storefront, or studio by appointment, signage will be important in branding your business. Chic exterior signage, including vinyl window graphics and sidewalk signs, drive traffic. Make sure to incorporate your standard logo, typography, and color palette into all signage to ensure that your branding is consistent and compelling, solidifying your brand in customers’ minds.

And, if you ever have the opportunity to sell your art at a fair or a pop-up shop, don’t forget to set up some signage to draw people in!

Score Lovely Décor

In the era of social media, décor is playing an even bigger role in brand marketing. Customers provide free advertising every time they take a photo in your store or studio to post to their social media, making it an easy brand development win.

This applies too if you’re a content creator and you work in front of backdrops, in a studio or home. What you show says a lot about you, and can detract from or contribute to your brand identity.

How to Brand Yourself for Social Media: Know Your Brand Voice

Social media branding relies heavily on voice, so you need to really know your own, and when putting any content out, ask “does this sound like me?”.

It’s important to choose the platforms that make the most sense for your brand. Each social media platform has a specific demographic, often broken down by age.
The type of language you use on social media—the wording of Instagram captions, Tweets and Facebook posts—should speak directly to your audience.

Finding this voice can be tricky, so always try to keep these key questions in mind:

• Who is your audience? The age demographic will tell you whether or not using slang, GIFs, and pop culture references are appropriate, and which ones will resonate with them.
• What is your brand’s culture? This goes back to your core values. 
• If your brand were represented by a character, who would it be? Think of your ideal representative, and how they would communicate.
• Have you conducted market research? Sprout Social’s insights has shown that honesty and authenticity are the most important traits of a brand’s social media voice. 
• Who is speaking for your brand? Is it just you, or will it be a team of content writers? Ask yourself:
• Do we use social jargon, slang, and colloquialisms?
• Do we speak candidly on subjects, or are we more diplomatic?
• Do we have a clear customer service strategy in place?
• Do we use hashtags or emojis regularly?

It’s important to establish ground rules of how your brand uses its voice, so that all writers’ content can be consistent.

Use These Brand Development Strategies

You may have an exquisite brand identity guide— an eye-catching logo, beautiful color palette, contemporary typeface, stunning website, and crystal clear voice. How do you make the most of this on social media?

Here are some branding do’s and don’ts:

• Do engage frequently! Engagement promotes feedback and generates a positive customer experience. Like positive comments, reply to questions, and handle any negative comments or concerns with a friendly, polite, constructive tone. Posting consistently is crucial—nothing kills traffic quicker than lack of new content.
• Don’t look to big established brands for a social media template—brands like Adidas can have their slogan as their bio because they’re already well-known. Your Twitter and Instagram bio should be informative but short and to-the-point, describing what your brand has to offer. 
• Do invest in social media software. There are dozens of programs and tools out there to help you generate an automated content-posting schedule, to catch your audience at the right time and increase engagement and feedback. There are plenty of platforms that offer free trials of their social media managing, publishing and analytics tools to measure and monitor your success.
• Don’t over-explain. Keep your captions short, and limit the use of hashtags to one per post (if appropriate). Cluttering your timeline with too many hashtags and long-winded captions disconnects you from your audience. Studies have shown that our average attention span is approximately 7 seconds long—about the same as a goldfish.
• Do keep your visuals consistent. Your logo and color palette should be reflected on your social media—especially when it comes to a visuals-heavy platform like Instagram. Your profile photo/avatar should be your logo. Keep all posted visuals consistent by cropping or filtering them the same way.

Take a look at the way popular tattoo artist @johnboytattoo curates his Instagram feed—you’ll notice all his images have a similar feel with a distinctive style. If you have an opportunity to be creative in your gallery, take it! It will help with your brand recognition.

Utilize A Brand Style Guide

An important part of implementing and building your brand identity is creating a brand style guide. This perfectly packaged booklet will display all of your visuals and explain your brand’s voice, tone, and values. Fill it with examples and use-cases, so that the style guide can function as a guideline for all your branding needs. 

When working with contributors or collaborators, this is a must-have so you’re on the same page. If you have done market research, this is also a good place to add your findings and explain how they inform your approach.

Take every brand-association opportunity, and the end result will be a solid, brand identity guide. The initial investment in approaching this thoughtfully, thoroughly and creatively will save you time in the future.

Now that you have the tools you need to start building your brand, get it out there! If you’re ready to start your website, we have lots of amazing templates to effortlessly showcase your work.

Want even more tips on how to build your brand? Check these out:
13 Qualities of Every Well-Designed Portfolio Website
A Guide to Social Media Strategy For Your Creative Business
How to Start Your Own Podcast: A Creator’s Guide