Nessa’s knowledge bombs: #4 Your brand is important
What do you enjoy doing as a designer? Do you love the execution phase? Perhaps you really enjoy speaking to users. I myself enjoy the problem-solving aspect of design. Whatever you enjoy doing, take that and use it as a basis to form your personal brand. A personal brand is a unique identity designed to promote yourself. It is something that I often see designers neglect, and it becomes an afterthought.
Nielsen Norman Group predicts that there will be 100 million UX professionals by 2050, and crafting your own personal brand is key to helping you stand out from the crowd of designers. It can help to provide clarity to your goals and help to guide your decisions in your career. In short, a strong brand helps to showcase the skills you are great at.
Once you have your branding in place, you can use it to promote yourself by creating and sharing content in line with your brand. Promoting yourself doesn’t mean that you have to post every day on LinkedIn. Before posting, I would advise you to consider your content and what forums work best for the content you want to put out into the world. The important thing to remember is the content should reflect who you are as a brand and also have something to say rather than regurgitate content from other people.
Top tips for creating and promoting your personalised brand:
Identify your target audience
In this case, it's identifying what companies you want to work for and who your brand would appeal to
Create a one-line elevator pitch which summarises your brand and use it on your LinkedIn headline, CV and portfolio
Apply your brand consistently across your portfolio, CV and LinkedIn profile
Continue to evolve your brand as you develop your career
Nessa’s knowledge bombs are a series of short bite-size bombs of advice that I have learned over the years.
Image originally sourced from Girl Vectors by Vecteezy
