The rise of personal brands means the rise of personal logos – here’s mine, what’s yours?
Personal branding is one of the big themes today, for a number of reasons.
As I wrote in five key trends in how influence is transforming society, one of the dominant forces is that reputation is shifting from the corporate to the individual. People build relationships and place trust in individuals more than organizations, changing how (the best) companies organize themselves and engage externally.
In addition, professionals are increasingly shifting to independent work in a global distributed economy. As such they must build their own brands and not rely on their affiliation with the brand of the company for which they work.
In a world of massive information overload and competition for attention, people who are do not make efforts to be visible are invisible, unable to be found. There will be two types of people: content creators and non-content creators. Those who create content are actively shaping how they are seen, and making themselves visible and findable.
As companies discovered long ago, visual icons are a powerful way of encapsulating and conveying their brands and identities. Our personal representations of brands are usually associated with their logos. Nike’s swoosh and Coca-Cola’s familiar white-on-red curlicues ARE the brands, far more than the name.
So in a world of personal brands, it is time for many of us to create personal logos.
While many designers, who often work under their own name and need to promote their design capabilities, have created personal logos for themselves, very few others have to date.
However I believe that personal logos will take off spectacularly this year and beyond.
I created my personal logo specifically to help people understand how my personal brand relates to those of my companies. We have created a visualization of our group of companies’ business model for public consumpation, which we’ll release shortly.
My core public identity is of ‘futurist and entrepreneur’ – I think and communicate about the future, and build businesses that tap into my thinking on where things are going.
As for several of our logos, I used 99designs to get this done. While it was a difficult process, I’m pleased with the logo we created above. It brings in themes of networks, merging people and networks, and shifting into the future.
That’s my logo. What’s yours? Do you think you need one? What does it mean when more and more of us have personal logos?
