Today we’re talking about logo designs for personal brands. What makes a great logo design for a personal brand? It may be different for a personal brand than for a corporate brand. It may be different for a small business brand.
WHY DO PERSONAL BRANDS NEED A LOGO DESIGN
What’s different is being a personal brand means that your reputation and everything about your brand identity is connected to who you are, not to a faceless company.
When thinking about your logo, I want you to have that same context. You want your logo to be easily identifiable and personal, and the key to all this is to keep it simple. Use something that is very connected to you and who you are, which for most people is going to be your name.
I’m going to give you three ways to think about what your logo should be using a mixture of names, symbols, and things like that.
The first is going to be your name/title. The second is going to be your initials or some type of symbol, plus your name and title. The third is going to be a signature. This is an autograph of some sort, using that as your logo. Let’s go through those three options.
PERSONAL LOGOS ARE DIFFERENT FROM BUSINESS LOGOS
What I’m excluding from this is a well-designed professional, emblematic type symbol logo that you would have created for your business brand that is based on the core values of the business.
Those are great things to do for a business that is not based on a person, but when it’s a person, I think you got to keep it simple and true to just who you are and not overly done, especially if you’re getting started, which most people are.
LOGO DESIGN #1: NAME AND TITLE
The first idea is your name/title. Again, this is just simply your full name spelled out and then under that your title. You can mix this up in different ways. You could have just done your first name, last name and pick a strong font.
This is what gets unique about doing it this way is you can either pick a font that just speaks to you in some way, shape, or form. Look through all the fonts and pick one that when your name is spelled out is interesting. You can choose to make some letters larger than others. Make the first letter of your first and your last name larger than the rest of the word.
Play with the size and the look of it. Create a different color scheme for the background versus the foreground for the letters versus the background. You can create shadows and highlights and then you can italicize it or not italicize it. The point is, make it look unique, but something that fits your personality of the brand.
YOUR LOGO SHOULD MATCH YOUR BRAND’S PERSONALITY
If you have a fun, flirty brand, (maybe it’s in the health space or something like that,) you can do something more flowy. However, if you are doing something very serious, like a lawyer’s personal brand or something like that, you might want to use something more traditional in terms of fonts.
Pick a font that works and then figure out what you want it to look like color scheme-wise. I’ll say for all of these, you want a version of it that is just black and white. Black letters on a white background and on a transparent background that you can take and put anywhere.
You’re going to want this to be on your website, on your business cards, and everywhere else. Make sure you have versions of it that are like that.
YOU CAN INCLUDE YOUR TITLE
Then it’s not just your name. A lot of the time it’s your title too, what it is that you do. The title is not CEO. In this case, the title is related to what you do to help people.
If it is law, I don’t want you to say CEO of law firm XYZ. I want you to say “Lawyer”, “Attorney at law”, or whatever you want to say, whatever your title is. If you are in the health space, I want you to say “Fitness coach”, “Wellness coaching”, “Nutrition coaching”, whatever that thing is.
If you’re in the business space, again “Business coach” or “Business coaching”. I like the “ING” versions of it. It sounds a little bit better, less like a title and more like what you do. I think that works better for these kinds of things.
Just imagine your name in big, bold letters, and then under that, “Business Coaching”. Easy and simple. You can sometimes separate that with a line between your name and the title if you’d like. That’s just a visual preference.
PLAY WITH LOGO DESIGN LAYOUT AND FONTS
If you have a really long name as I do, you might want to consider stacking your name one on top of the other, i.e. Brandon on top, Birkmeyer on the bottom, and then spreading out the letters of the shorter name to match so that there they create the same beginning and endpoints in the logo. That’s just something that you can work with until it matches up perfectly.
However, I still prefer if you can have it all together so you can put the title under it, as opposed to having multiple things stacked on top of each other. If the name is still too long, maybe just use your first initial of your first name with a dot and then your last name.
For me, I’d probably use B. Birkemeyer, and then under that “Branding Coach” or “Brand Coaching”, one of those things. Do something like that.
That’s option one. Again, play with the fonts until you find something that you really like. Another option within that is you can actually go have someone create a font for you.
Google “Create a font”, and there are companies that are out there for not too much money that will create a whole series of letters for you. A lot of corporate companies do this. They’ll create their own font, their own alphabet.
You can use buy that font and it is yours. You own it. Then you can use that in your logo. You don’t have to use it on all your texts on your website, but you could. The goal is that you at least have something that’s very customized.
LOGO DESIGN #2: USE YOUR INITIALS AND A SYMBOL
The second option is to use just your initials or a symbol for your logo. You can add to that the name and title as we talked about before next to it your initial. For me, it would be BB (for Brandon Birkmeyer.)
I can either just leave them as just two B’s, or I would surround them in some way. I can add a box around them. I could add a circle around them, or some other kind of a line that cuts through the background to add interest to those letters, or do some unique shadowing or 3D effect. Start with those with the two letters and pick a font that you like. See if you can make those letters look like something in a unique way.
If it helps, you can draw that stuff out. When you get to this point, you could draw these things out by hand, and then you can take a picture of them with your phone. Then you can add them to a graphic design tool you can buy, and remove the background so it’s just the letters.
FIND TOOLS TO HELP YOU DESIGN
By the way, for all this stuff you can go to a tool like Canva and create all these things yourself. It’s one of the easiest tools out there. It’s free for the most part. Play around in that space.
Type in the letters, see what they all look like, and that’s going to help you visualize what this could be for a brand and a logo like yours. If you guys want to download that, you can go to brands on brands.com/canva, and that will give you some options to set that up.
The other thing is, for a symbol, you can use something that represents what your brand is. For branding like me, I might use the BB, or I might use something else, like a hashtag. The hashtag symbol could be my logo if I play with it and create a unique one in some way, or a microphone or something like that.
Just think of what you immediately think of when you think of your industry. You can use that as your symbol, plus the letters of your name or just that symbol. You can even type in icons for your industry. Google search and see what pops up and then create one based on what you’ve seen is more common so that you have a simple symbol.
Again, I would use that as your main icon, and then next to the icon, I would write your full name and title just like we did before.
LOGO DESIGN #3: CREATE AN AUTOGRAPH
The third option is to use a signature. This is kind of a newer approach that a lot of people have started to take, which is some sort of flowy script handwriting that represents your logo. Think of it as if you had written or signed something, what that would look like. Depending on the length of it, you could write your first name and last name, or you can write just your first initial of your first name and your last name.
I would write your whole name. I wouldn’t shorten your last name or something like that. I’d write your name out, and then if you do need something shorter, just use the initial for your first name. That’s handwritten, but under that, I’d write your title in regular font, not in handwriting so that that’s not some weird signature.
You have your signature that’s more personal, and then under that, you have that your title in regular letters. That’s your third option.
DON’T USE YOUR ACTUAL SIGNATURE
What I would caution with this is not to use your real signature. Don’t use something that you would actually use to sign checks or things like that, nothing official that people can now forge because you’ve given it to them.
I would create a fake signature that’s more like an autograph that you would give. You can exaggerate the first letter. For me, my B would be more exaggerated. Then the end of the signature could be a funny loop that’s a little larger and is also exaggerated.
Think of it more like an autograph versus a signature that you would use on official documents. It’s a script that represents your name. What’s great is you can just type that in using fonts that are already available and see how it looks.
Then you can add to that, edit and layer it. Or you can actually get a piece of white paper and sign, not the way you would sign a document, but just sign your name in an autograph type format and take a picture of it. Again, upload it, remove the background, and now you have it.
EXPERIMENT WITH CALLIGRAPHY
A great way to do that is with more of a thick marker, not a pen. Even better, if you can get a specific calligraphy type marker, that’s going to look the best. You don’t have to be a calligrapher to do that. Just sign your name with some exaggerated letters in a way that you like. If you want that, but you just don’t feel like you have the skill for that, then ask someone else to do it.
Again, you can go on Google and hire companies, whether it’s a freelancer or a company that does this specifically to create a signature for you that is more designed. That gets a little more expensive, but it is an option, especially if this is something you’re going to carry with you into the future. They get fancy with it. They make it not just black and white. Sometimes they can make it look metallic or things that are more 3D.
LOGO DESIGN CAN BE EASY AND STRAIGHTFORWARD
Those are options for you. What I like about all these is it is a simple way to create a logo without wasting a lot of your time. It is true to being a personal brand. It represents you like not many other things can. It gets the job done.
I would start with something simple if you’re just trying to get it done but look at some of these other options if you’re out there looking and you’re struggling for what you think would really represent you. Nothing represents you like your name.
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