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Do you want to take your creative business to the next level in 2025? These rules of personal branding will help you stand out from the competition.
You’ve kick-started your creative business, and projects are starting to head your way. But how can you keep the momentum going? Personal branding is essential for attracting and retaining clients, making your business more memorable and professional.
So today, we’ll share 10 essential rules of personal branding for creatives, discussing where to begin with brand building and how to flesh out a lasting brand. We’ll also go through some inspiring personal branding examples.
The short answer is yes. You definitely need your own personal branding if you want to work commercially in the creative sector. It comes down to trust and professionalism—would you be more likely to trust the person with a branded website or the one without? At its most basic, personal branding is simply a way of saying to your customers, “You can trust me; I have this in hand.”
In the era of the influencer, it can feel like every man and his dog has a personal brand, but this shouldn’t put you off from carving out your niche. There are loads of benefits to establishing a personal brand, including:
Whether you’re a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer, artist, or app designer, creating and developing a personal brand is worth the effort. The ten personal branding rules below provide a good structure for building your brand from scratch. We’ll highlight helpful resources, branding examples, and familiar brand pitfalls.
What do you want to achieve with your new branding, and what would you like to prioritize? Perhaps you want to reach new clients, make your brand memorable on social media, or become more professional and trustworthy. Maybe you’ve seen a competitor succeed with their branding (a little green-eyed market research never hurt anyone), or perhaps you want to create a shiny new brand identity for a new website, store, or social media account.
While you’d likely want to achieve most of these things through creating a personal brand, your goals and priorities should be personal to you. Setting out what you want to achieve will motivate you throughout the branding process and help you refine your brand in a more targeted way. Write up a list of five brand goals—this personal brand statement is something you can return to as you build the brand and ensure you’re still on the right track.
Graphic designer Jessica Walsh, of New York-based agency &Walsh, says she wanted to start and brand her own agency so she “would have varied clients and challenges”, and to provide a platform for discussing sidelined issues, like mental health, through the lens of visual design.
A personal branding example closer to home would be my branding experience for my design business, Blue Whippet Studio. My main goal at the outset of the process was to professionalize the brand so that I could attract agency-level work (spoiler: it worked!). As time has passed, I’ve developed and added to my brand goals, but I still come back to this cornerstone goal I created my brand to ‘level up’ my business from the freelance (and brand-less) business it had been beforehand.
You must be champing at the bit to dive in with creating your brand, but before you start mood boarding, getting to know your niche and where you will sit in the larger creative market is an excellent idea. This involves two areas of market research:
Know Your Customer (KTC) is a term that originated in the financial industry, but it’s a helpful way of thinking about the commercial goals for your creative business. Take a moment to imagine your ideal customer, the type of person you think would be interested in your services or products. What are their interests? Where do they live, hang out, and shop? What age are they, and what gender? What other brands do they buy from or aspire to? Then, this thought experiment will be extended to different customer profiles. How can you adapt your branding for different audiences? Will you place your bets on a more targeted customer profile or try to give your branding a broader appeal?
The more you can step into the shoes of your target customer, the more likely you are to create a brand with them in mind rather than only yourself.
Next, extend your market research to your potential competitors. For newer creative businesses, this might simply be freelancers, designers, and artists, or you might want to compete with agencies or larger studios.
This is a good exercise for sizing up who you’ll be competing with to win work and for helping to situate your business into a broader market. You want to appear as if you belong in the right place while carving out your niche.
You might find that lots of your competitors (or let’s call them fellow creatives) are using similar visual traits in their branding. This brand homogenization is standard and is worth (partially) adopting in your brand design. The advantage of homogenization is that it helps to tell clients that you ‘fit in’, making you appear trustworthy and established. The drawback is that you risk your personal branding looking too similar to other creative businesses.
It’s all a question of striking the right balance—using your competitor research to identify some brand traits you can also use while creating your unique brand identity.
OK, on to the fun stuff! Designing your personal brand logo is an excellent place to start building your personal branding. This identifying ‘stamp’ will act as the keystone of your brand, featuring on all of your branded output, such as website, stationery, and social media channels.
Whether you opt for a symbolic logo (image alone), a type-based logo design (of your brand name, for example), or a combination of type and image, you can design a logo from scratch by sketching ideas and vectorizing a final design or customize a logo template to create a polished result quickly.
You’ll need to save your logo in scaleable vector format as an Adobe Illustrator or EPS file and adapt the design for different size requirements, such as small icons for social media platforms, favicons, and mobile web designs.
Color is all-important in personal branding, acting as a psychological and aesthetic mood-setter for all your brand designs. Many of the best personal branding examples make clever use of color to put across a brand message—edgy neons for trend-driven agencies, soft pastels to boost friendly appeal, or moody dark colors for a mysterious, aspirational look.
Once you’ve decided what tone to strike, you must develop a brand color palette of web-friendly RGB and print-compatible CMYK color swatches to incorporate color into your personal branding. Dividing your palette into core colors (two or three colors that will be the most dominant in your branding) and a supporting deck of secondary colors can help structure how you use the colors in your designs and build consistency in the way you use colors.
A good branding color tip is to use an anchoring color that you really, genuinely love. After all, you’ll be seeing a lot of it!
It’s not what you say… It’s the font you use to say it!
Typography brings character and tone into your written communications. Creative businesses often exist solely in a digital space, so you must get your font choices just right. It’s how your clients will ‘see’ how you talk, defining the personality behind the copy.
The days of limiting your font choices to Times New Roman or Arial (eek!) are long gone, but the vast selection of fonts available now can be overwhelming for the first-time personal brander. A quick brush-up on font styles can point you in the right direction, with general guidance being that sans serifs give a cleaner, more minimalistic look, while serif fonts edge a brand towards a more traditional or vintage style.
A good rule of thumb is to limit your personal brand type to just two or three different fonts to avoid overcrowding, and make sure the fonts you choose are available as both web fonts and print typefaces (there’s nothing worse than landing on the perfect font, only to find you can’t use it on your Squarespace site!).
If you see a font you love on a website, Right-Click > Inspect to investigate the code and see which font style has been used.
One of the often neglected aspects of personal branding is the styling of imagery, which can be an afterthought for even the most visual of creative freelancers. No doubt you’ll be looking to use photography and/or illustrations across your website and social profiles, and defining the brand style will help build consistency and memorability into your personal brand.
Set a list of rules to which all your images—including graphics, illustrations, and photography—and video content must adhere to pass your ‘brand test.’ So whether you’re using your own imagery, stock photography, or a combination of the two, you can always ensure they meet consistent standards.
An example list might be that all images must feature one or more brand colors, all bio photos must feature smiling subjects, and all illustrations must be minimalist and line-drawn. This simple list already sets the tone for your images, and you can build on it over time as you bring more imagery into your brand designs.
The visual aspects of your personal brand are starting to come together, but you also need to consider incorporating some personal brand traits into your writing and speaking.
What tone will you adopt in your written content? Tone can vary from formal to casual, with a polished tone generally suited for more corporate contexts. In contrast, a fun, informal tone can be a great way of infusing your writing with a sense of your personality. You might also want to adapt your brand tone for different purposes, such as adopting a down-to-business tone for your website while using a more humorous, engaging tone for your social media content.
Your brand tone should feel like a natural companion to the visual side of your personal brand, so avoid using a tone or language that clashes with the style of your imagery. It will help you have a unique brand story.
With all of your branding elements in place, it’s time to push the launch button and introduce your personal brand to the world!
Treating your brand launch as a social media marketing campaign is a great idea for building buzz from an early point. In the run-up to the brand launch, build teasers and behind-the-scenes content into your feed, and make your new brand a keystone of your communications for the launch day and weeks that follow.
The challenge now is to keep awareness of your personal brand high without causing ‘brand fatigue’! You can maintain interest in your brand by weaving in interesting video snippets of the brand in use or a breakdown of how you created your personal brand logo.
You can also use other promotional tactics, such as guerilla marketing, Google advertising, or a physical launch event, to keep people engaged with your new brand outside of social media.
Your personal brand is live—great job! You can now start using your brand across all of your platforms, and hopefully, you’ll see more interest in your business as a result. Brand awareness can take a little time to build, so be patient and update your followers and clients regularly with branded newsletters and social posts.
If, after six months or a year, however, things aren’t going so well, you might need a rethink. Sometimes (in fact, often!) new brands don’t quite hit the mark, and sometimes they even need a complete overhaul or refresh. Perhaps you’re not seeing the uptick in referrals you were hoping for, or you might even have had some feedback about your personal branding that wasn’t so hot.
Personal branding can feel so, well, personal! Taking criticism on the chin is tough, but try to identify which aspects of the branding could be improved. Perhaps your website uses colors that are difficult to read, or maybe your personal brand logo looks too similar to a different brand. A rebrand is a brave move, but it usually pays off (just ask Addison Rae), and it often only involves a few ‘tweakments’ to make your branding work as hard for you as it should.
This could also mean taking your personal brand to the next level with brand extensions!
Creating your personal branding can be a challenging and enriching journey—it can sometimes feel like pouring a bit of your soul into a design!
Don’t sweat if you need to refresh or return to the brand drawing board. Brands all need a little glow-up now and again to keep them fresh and current. With good brand bones in place, all that’s required is a little tweak or update here and there.
Hopefully, the brand you’ve built will stand the test of time, becoming a source of personal pride and an effective strategy for attracting new clients to your creative business. Build it, and they will come!
You can find everything you need to build a successful brand on Envato, your one-stop shop for logos, fonts, photos, social media templates, and much more. Create a solid foundation by reading our guide to branding trends and taking a behind-the-scenes peek at Envato’s new brand campaign.
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