Visualising Your Personal Identity (http://bit.ly/mym-visual)
MYM workshop links
- Resource of resources
- Tips on Graphic Design in slides from an IDE Academy workshop
- Random images for a collage
- If you use existing icons and visuals, adjust them to fit your style
- Take pictures of everything you do for your portfolio. Make sure to document the process.
As a design student, you have probably made a portfolio or a resume. And redone it. Changed it up. Redesigned it. Thrown all old versions out, started from scratch but still didn’t find the exact style you were looking for. It wasn’t up to your taste after two weeks, it felt stale after a year or maybe it never suited you in the first place. So, does it ever get better? I’m not in a position to promise you anything, but at least I could help you define a truly personal style which can be applied consistently. That’s what this is about.
With a personal identity or visual style, you’re trying to convey who you are through your design. This should help potential future employers, clients and others to get a feeling for who you are without meeting you. By mixing your personal and professional self, both in what you are and what you strive to be, you might be able to achieve this. Of course, you want it to be beautiful and modern, but just a heads up: looking at platforms like Dribbble and Behance for inspiration is fine, but make sure not to compare yourself to professional graphic designers or illustrators and also avoid copying (too much).
To make sure you can also apply your style consistently, you can create a guide which stays constant. However, iteration is encouraged, since you probably won’t find the perfect style on your first try and since you change over the years, the style needs to adapt to that personal growth.
Draw two circles, with “me as a person” and “me as a student/designer” written inside: it’s time for a classic word web exercise. Take ten minutes to write down as many characteristics as you can think of. It’s not yet important whether they fit perfectly, overlap or whatever. To get you started, you can think of these questions:
- Who are you and what’s your story?
- What do you believe in?
- What makes you different then other people in your field?
- What are your strengths?
Take a few minutes to explain who you are based on the characteristics you have written down. Tell this short ‘story’ to someone and ask them to ask questions to dig deeper, so you can figure out together what’s really important and deepen your understanding of yourself. Then, pick the three main characteristics. Things to take into consideration:
- What makes you stand out?
- Include both personal and professional traits
- Show humility; it’s fine if one of the traits is not just positive
- Are these qualities specific to you as a designer?
To turn these words into something visual, grab some magazines and other visual material and start looking for images fitting to your three main characteristics. You can look for photos, fonts, colours, patterns, animations, gradients, etc. It can be a direct representation of a word, just a tangent, or something which you find serendipitously and really speaks to you. Combine these elements into a collage.
If you want, you can share the story around your collage with someone else. Explain which images you picked for what reason, what they mean to you, in relation with your characteristics and how they fit the whole. Hopefully, this helps you create an even better story and figure out the important parts of your collage.
Now, it’s time to turn the collage into style elements. Look for one or two fonts, two or three colours, some patterns, a photo treatment, text styling, etc. Some elements can be taken directly from the collage, like colours, while other things might need to be created and adjusted to fit with the rest (for example: when going for a more classical look, maybe a serif combined with some pastels is the way to go—but the same font with neon colours might show a contrast between the classical and modern). Assemble everything into a small style guide, so you have some elements to apply to your next project.
With your next output (portfolio, report, website, resume, etc.) try out your style. See if it works, if you need more or less freedom and adjust the guide as needed. Remember: it’s probably never finished, it might still go stale, but after a few iterations you hopefully find something to grow on you.