Build your personal brand and stand out online

1. Intro: Hello, I'm Manuel, a Swiss UI and UX designer and also brand and to just two series, my branding course. And you're going to learn four main things. First, we're going to develop your brand car, which consists out of your values, your purpose statement, and your characteristics. Then you're going to learn how to find out your uniqueness. Also, you will learn how to talk about yourself and your business and forth. You will create your own brand style guide. This class is for beginners who just want to get started online. Maybe you, for You Tube channel or Instagram, and just start building their personal brand. You will need no prior knowledge, and you also don't need to know about any tools. We're going to use Figma in this course to create your identity. But technically you could also use Canvas or anything else. My goals with the course were to break down branding, which is a big subject and make it really simple for you. And I also want to get your acting. Here in this little diagram, you see most people get nothing done because they consume a lot of content and they don't produce any contents themselves and they wanted to, you can make a transition from consuming content to actually producing content yourself. Which in the end, we'll mainly help building your personal brand. Then in the class project, you will receive a branding worksheets that covers all the exercises we will discuss in this course. Also, you will get access to pre-done color, color palettes, like those here, which I created that are about, I think fairly of those inside the course. Here are just a few to show you, and also topography templates that show very nice type pairings. You can just then pick your preferred choices and create your own identity. From that, your own brand identity might look something like this here, which I created for myself. It is nothing big, but it will do the job to get you started. So like we will have a little logo, a color palette, and also your typefaces. Then the last thing I can say is it's going to be a simple course, but most things are simple and you still have to do them if you want to get anywhere. So that was my introduction and see you in the first lesson. 2. Internal & External Brand: Welcome to Lesson 2, internal branding. The main thing I want you to understand here is that branding consists out of two parts. One part is here, the peak of the iceberg. What people see, it's your visual identity, your logo, colors, and typography, right? And then the other part which is even bigger and more important in My Eyes, is your internal brand, okay? Your internal brand is what people don't see, like for example, your values. Okay? You should think about it this way. Every body or everyone can copy what you do. They can copy your service, your product, they can even copy or visual brand. I see that all the time. But most people will not be able to copy who you are, what you stand for, like your spirit in a way. I mean, so this is what you need to be aware of, internal, external brand. We're going to start working on the internal brand like directly in the next exercise. But we, before we jumped there, I would like that you are clear on your goals, okay? Because if we do a Branding workshop, I want that this is aligned with your goals. So please take your time. Ask yourself, where do you want to be in one year or three years? And maybe you can even tell where you want to be in 10 years. Maybe you want to launch like a smaller company, small team, maybe your own agency, branding agency or whatever. Or probably we want to release a course or a product, write this down here, and then jump to lesson number three. 3. Define your Values: Okay, welcome to Lesson 3 about your values. This is where everything really gets started. The first thing I want you to understand this, that your personal brand is a combination of how you see yourself, how other people see you. And as you might understand this circle here, how other people see you. You cannot fully control, like you can not go in other people's brains and kinda program what they should think about you or how they should see you, okay? So your reputation, which is basically as synonym to your personal brand, you can not a 100 percent control it. The only thing you can do is you can influence your reputation or you can influence what people think about you. And the best tool to influence that is your values, okay? So that's why we do it, influence perception. And also, I want that you align your actions like what you do with your values, because then you have like an aligned brands, okay? And this will build trust because people build trust to companies or other people that behave and act the same vase consistently, okay? Then another reason why you should define your values is that this is your number one differentiator. Because as we already covered in the last lesson, people can cover what you do, but they cannot cover who you are and your values are one of the biggest. How could they say like one of the biggest parts of who you are basically account. So how do you define your values? How normal exercises work is like this. They give you a list of values like this year. Nice cute list where you have nice sounding words like Respect, Innovation, Diversity, quality. I don't know. Well, speeds, whatever, like this lists are really cool. You can also screenshotted like this is the lower part. The upper part. So you have like a vert bank, this is great for inspiration. But still, I think you need some more guidance defining your values. Okay? So what they came up with is this set of guiding questions, okay? So ask yourself which of the words on the list they just show you feel most authentic to you. Ok? And now you might feel like are there are many, I don't really know, because what I wanted to do is I want you to select three to five, okay, We should not have 10 values, you should have maximum five, even better, free, because then you can really live up to it. You can memorize them, you know your values, okay, so less is even better here. Then. If you, if you really don't know, then ask yourself, who do you admire? Like, what do they stand for? Maybe you'd buy air, certain celebrity who really stands for integrity. Integrity. Okay? Are you can maybe think about a situation menu took a stand for someone or something in a debate, okay? For me, for example, when I have a debate with other people, mostly I say nothing because I don't want to participate in waste my time. But when it's about sustainability, like when they really talk trash about sustainability, like I have to tell them how it really is that I like take a stand in sustainability, right? Or when do you feel most like yourself? What are you then? Are, how are you then like okay. Like when you feel it when you're at home and you feel comfortable, how do you behave like? What is your true essence basically, okay. What is something you care about more than other people? For example, for me it's health like a particularly care about health more than other people. Like I like whenever I have the decision between healthy folder or unhealthy food, I take the healthy one or two exercises, I move. Okay? Here you can also see your values are Like defining how you act, okay? Then what is important to you when you deal with other people? Do you value being fed or loyal? Okay, maybe you have like a certain way you treat people which is really special to you, then this should be part of your values. Okay? So screenshotted those questions, saved them. Like if, if you're, if you have difficulties defining value stake and really help you a lot, okay? Then another thing you need to pay attention is. Values like quality and reliability, they sound nice, but they are overused. They are overused and they became meaningless. Okay? Quality and reliability should be a standard for everybody. Don't put it as values, then good values should be unique and authentic to you. And they should also be aligned with your target audience. And this is important because for our example, think about Harley Davidson, like the motorcycle company. Imagine the CEO or the founder like one of his values, what Waltz law. And I don't know like law of and care. But this doesn't align with his brand. Like it doesn't align with motorcycles. So he can say, okay, my, my, my values are love and care, but they also care about excitement and adventure in. And then you better take this values, excitement and adventure because they align with your target audience better. Okay, so on the last thing to pay attention is to cultivate values you already have within you. Because it's hard to be somebody else, like just be yourself and be more of it. Comb. Then I have some instructions for selecting your values. Because normal value exercises, they tell you to just pick three to five words. And this I agree on like pick three to five words, not more, like five should be the maximum. And then you're good in our amine. And this is weird because what do you do with five beautiful sounding words? Like it doesn't help you a lot. And I want that you make your values actionable sentences like there should not be nice words, they should be actionable sentences which you actually do. For example, innovation, innovation. I don't know this information like how do you live innovation? As an example, there would be look at things from a different angle, okay? This is what you can do. Or honesty, like, how do you live? Honesty, this is not a value like but telling people the truth, this is a value, are actually honesty is also a value that is a bit like the ones we had up here. Quality and reliability. It should be a standard. Okay. Like if you have honesty has a value, maybe you have a problem, okay? But really, I want you to understand, make the noun into a verb or an actionable sentence, okay? Like freedom, express yourself freely and openly, okay? Or respect. How do you live? Respect, treat people the way you want to be treated, for example. And you can write also something different here. It doesn't have to be the same for everybody. A value can MY, can mean different things for everybody. Okay? So the simplest and most efficient value exercise looks like this. You select your value, which is most certainly a noun which you got from this list here, like freedom, okay? And then, right, your actionable sentence below it, like, how do you lift this value? What do you do? Okay, like art can be a verb. Okay. Most certainly I will put in the attachment a worksheet called exercises, where I will summarize all those exercises for you. But you don't even have to use the worksheet. You can basically just take your Google Docs, writes down value1, and then write down actionable sentence to value one and you're good, okay? If you're still having difficulties. I do have an example from myself here because one of my values is minimalism, okay? And they did come up with several actionable sentences. How I live up to this value. For, for example, I do less but better. Or I put focus on the important things and leave everything else out a k because I want to stay minimum, right? Or I stick to the fundamentals and don't do more than necessary. Our do fewer things, but do them better, right? So this is how a good value should look like. I hope this helps you and see you in Lesson 4. 4. Write a Purpose Statement: Welcome to lesson 4, which is the purpose statement, also called device. This is still part of your internal brand. And the most important thing when it comes to the purpose statement is to ask yourself, why are you doing what you're doing besides making money? Because, I mean, if you're honest, every brand's purpose in some way is to make money. Like then we would write all the same because we all need to survive. You all need to make our own living and VI all on to thrive and grow, and money is needed to do that. So it would be really boring if every company would say our purposes to make a lot of money and grow and become really big and stuff. That's why we don't say that this is something you need to be aware of. We want to go one layer deeper and ask ourself, why are we doing what we are doing besides making money? Because we could also do something else to make money. But we're doing this activity which we're doing. And I have some guiding questions that will help you find your own purpose statement. The first one we already covered, the second one, why? Or what is the great purpose behind what you do? Maybe you have a great purpose behind what you do, the norm. Why do you exist? I do exist. And why should anybody care about you like That's a good one. Like, why should anybody care like? And then what cause can you contribute to that also relates to your audience. There are some great courses on this planet which brands can contribute to. Their audiences care about. And they have some examples of causes here. For example, unemployment is something your brand could help solve. Global warming is something grants can help solve. Education, government accountability, poverty or inequality, or safety are all hot topics that brands nowadays start to work on star to help support and solve Our. Now, you might ask yourself like, why, why do I have to do the purpose statement even like, it's cool, like to have reasons why to do is I'm saying but why, what does it bring you? And the purpose statement brings you a lot because it helps you differentiate yourself from your competition. Okay, let me make an example. Let's say you're producing clothing. Clothing is a completely oversaturated market. There are thousands of brands competing on producing clothes. If you produce clothes, I literally will ask you, why should they care? Like, why should they care about your clothes? Okay? And I know as we as a company that is really well branded, they sell clothing and whenever you pay, whenever you buy a piece of clothing from them, they will plant a tree. Okay, that's why I should care, because they will solve the cause of global warming, for example, okay? Or also just generally environment because trees are good against global warming and the environment, and that's via eBay, stuff from them. There is another Swiss brands that donates one piece of clothing for every purchase you do. So if I buy a t-shirt, they will donate a pisa T-Shirt that to somebody in need. They are for the year for poverty. They solve the problem of poverty because they give poor people clothing. And this helps them differentiate themselves from normal clothing brands. Like their purpose statement is the main differentiator. And both of them are doing great. I both brands are doing great in a completely oversaturated market. Okay, that's fine. You should do it. Write down your purpose statement here. It can be one sentence, it should be one sentence. It should be very simple and easy. You don't have to use lawyer language here. And to help you a little bit, they have examples. For example, ikea is here to create a better everyday life for many people, Lego is here to inspire and develop and develop the builders of tomorrow. But the cornea also played a great clothing brand, is in business to save our home planet. Okay, so normally you start your purpose statement. Refer who help or to save, like us to safeguard like public cornea, right? To life. Like you make it a little sentence. Like I do whatever I do to help, blah, blah, blah, or to safe public law or to contribute to blubber law. Okay. I think you can do that. It has to be about 80 percent good. You don't have to kill yourself on coming up with a perfect sentence. If it's 80 percent good, leave it on, vomited with it. 5. Define your caracteristics: Okay, welcome to lesson 5 about your unique characteristics. The characteristics are important for your brand because they tell the people how they perceive you, okay? There is a big difference between characteristics and values. Many people start to confuse them or even mixed them together. To recap, values are your guiding principles that will help you make decisions. Value, tell people how you act consistently. Basically how you tick. Whereas characteristics are more about how people should perceive you. You want to control how people perceive you. That's why you should care about your characteristics. Some are samples could be that you're realistic, structured, or practical. I do have some guiding questions that will help you find your own characteristics. Then, first one would be, what qualities do you have that have brought you to where you are today? Like maybe you're working in an office, maybe you are self-taught. So what qualities did bring you there? Reo, very structured, organized person. Are you and did you learn stuff by yourself or you're very persistent or, you know, then this will all be characteristics. How do you want your customers to experience you on a daily basis? Like do you want your customers to experience you as motivating, funny, inspiring, like this could also be characteristics. What qualities do your products or services have? Maybe you have a product that is really like a special characteristics you want to point out. For example, it's like very streamlined, very actionable, very applicable like this, for example, something I want to have with my products. What are the qualities that you find in your favorite role models that you also have. For example, maybes your own role models are having really inspiring people in order to having really structured processes and you find is really cool. Okay? Then what kind of person do you want to be in other people's life? You can ask yourself, how would a leader in your niche act? That's really important basically because all of you will one day become a leader if you really are persistent. And decisions already taken mind or keep in mind now because I see many people on Instagram being weird, like videos pointing adverts or dancing. And this is crawling, all told either would act in Aneesh like a leader, acts mainly like fought full authority is very grounded, like straight forward. And you can be entertaining and funny. This is definitely like, this is definitely allowed. But do not become Sealy. You know, like how many people do then except if it's part of your rental. If you are silly, that you need to be smart silly. Then what have other people stated about you in the past? Meaning maybe you're working office and people come into you into the office and they're like, Man, your work is so great. Like you work so fast. Like we'd like you're a fast worker or it could be lake yesterday in the meeting or so motivating or inspiring or great ideas you had. And this can all be characteristics that other people already see in U. And this is great if you nurture them in your brand to then how do people react to your actions or presence? Meaning, when you're in a room with other people, do they feel inspired by you? They feel entertained by you or maybe intimidated. In my case, sometimes people feel intimidated because I'm a bit direct and that's how I am. That's my, that's my brands right? Then. I hope this helps you kind of brainstorm about your own characteristics. You could write a small answer to all of those questions. And then I also have examples here. Like one of my characteristics is structured. Like I structured the course a structure many things. And the, the description to it is that they organize information in logical groups to have an overview. Or I want to understand first the big picture before I start working on something small. Or when I do something, I do it for Ollie and they just generally love to create clarity. Okay? I hope you perceive me as structured because as you already had in the previous lesson, I can never control how will we will perceive me, but I can act in a structured way. I can give you a structured course and maybe at the end of the day you will think that about me. So what I wanted to do in the end, this lesson is this exercise where you basically write down different characteristics. I made three examples here. For example, entertaining or your characteristic could be positive or inspiring. And then you write a small description to it. Like what it means to you. Hey, because it can mean something else for everybody. I know somebody he, his characteristic is entertaining and he loves to entertain people, make them feel relaxed and enjoying mentor Jose, like they just enjoy him being around him. Okay. That's it. 6. Find your Uniqueness: Okay, and I swear at lesson number 6, what makes you unique? If you are not unique, you don't stand out from your competitors and deal. We'll have to compete on price. And this is really not the situation I want you to be in. That's why we have to watch our competition. Now this is an exception because normally I want you to watch inside you and leverage what you have inside you, like your values and your y. But now you must watch your competition to find out what they are offering and what their messages. Okay, those two things I wanted to find out and then don't create a similar offer. They have like makes something different and don't have a similar message because most certainly your competitor is more established, a new or bigger than you are. And if you offer exactly the same thing and have executed the same message, you will be left behind. Okay? Then while you create your own offer area or your own service, keep in mind that everybody can copy your offer or service. Meaning if you try to stand out with what you're offering, you're in a dangerous position because it can be copied. What you rather should do is you should try to stand out with living up to your values and also communicating your why. People can copy your values. Yes, but for most people it will not be authentic. You can really live your values and be authentic how you are as a person and people will want to work, you work with you because of who you are, not really, because of what you're offering, because they are aligned with who you are, what your values are, your characteristics are, and like also, they probably want to be part of your y or they find it purposeful to support you because they like your y. That's why you should communicate that. And here I have a little exercise for you. It's the competitor exercise where you analyze them. You basically take the three main competitors. It doesn't have to be the biggest one, it has to be the closest one. Then analyze their offering and their message. So you can do something that's different and also have a look at what you like about it, what you hate about it, and what you could do better than something more I want you to consider is you should not be doing everything for everybody. If you do everything for everybody, you are well, first of all, not in a niche. So it's hard to stand out. And if you do it for everybody you're and not having like a target customer and it's again, harder to send out you will not be distinctive enough. And I want you to be distinctive. I want you to do one thing for one group of persons, for one group of people. And you should also stand for one thing like 1.5, clear message about what you do and for whom you do it. And that's why we write this transformation statement here. Where you basically say, I help your ideal customer, whoever it is, like your groups of customers. To achieve the transformation, let's say to lose weight together website to communicate better, to learn how to do sales like the transformation you want to give them. Like you help your ideal customer to the transformation to give them so they can achieve their goals, okay, like so they can sell if fees are so they can look confident on line, are so they can get in shape. They always wanted to be in or feel confident in your body or whatever you want to put in there. And if this statement is not very applicable for your solution, offering, there is another one where you say, I help ideal client or your ideal client, whoever it is, our column or get past a big problem, okay. Through the methodology or through the offer you're offering so they can reach their goal. Also, it's very similar, but a bit different. Watch yourself which one is better applicable for your situation. And then that's it for the finding your uniqueness. 7. Tell your Story: Okay, Next one is telling your story. You must be able to communicate who you are about, what you're offering, what you're doing to your audience. And this here is a big thing. If you don't get online. If you don't go in your reels, in your stories, and if you don't start talking about yourself, your brand will never grow. Okay? Like you can spend decades in your basement coming up with all the branding statements, creating the best logo, the best color palette, everything best. But if you don't show up online, if you don't get acting, nothing will happen. Okay? So I really want you to tell your story. And it's not about having the perfect story. It's more about going online and just talking like basically you can skip this lesson, go online and just talk about yourself, talked about what you value, your mission, like, what do you want to do or how we want to help people, your transformation statement, whom you help, we fought and you're good. But if you feel like you would like to have a little bit of a framework to feel more confident. This I can give you here. First of all, what I want you to consider is that you always have a similar tone and voice. What does it mean? I want you to talk a bit consistently. Like I don't want it to show up one day being like very lovely, tolerant voice, like really like, oh yeah, hello everybody. Nice to see you today. And then the other day you show up like swearing like this got them people just blah, blah, blah. Like I wanted to have a consistent tone and voice every day. Either you're happy or your direct or your, I don't know, like a bit more introvert or extrovert. However, you want to talk, talk the way you are and be consistent. Then the framework, I would like to give you this story framework. If you share your story, people will connect to a few more. This is already known and humans corrected humans logic. Okay? So normally, when you tell a story, I would start with the goal. For example, you wanted to achieve something, okay, maybe three years ago you wanted to become a video editor. Let's take the video editor as a, as a, as an example, you wanted to become a video editor. But there was a conflict. Okay. Like the conflict was that you were not confident selling video editing editing services, for example. You had no sales skills. You're always say yes to all the projects you got. And you basically didn't manage to become an editor because it didn't manage to run your business properly, okay, like that was the conflict. And at 1, there is a decision you take. And the decision is like the turning point. For example, you might get helped with a mentor or remade sign up to a course. Or you might just decide that site for yourself that you will never, again under charged that you will say no to projects and only take the ones that are good for you, you know. And following this decision, there is a Czerny happening. Like you're growing, you'll learn more skills or you get more clients or whatever. Like you talk about the journey and in the end, you talk about the transformation. Like what happened, like what happened if you live basically like now, you can sell with ease and your video editing businesses running well. And that you're now curvatures to say no to projects that are not good for you. And I can quickly unfolds those points. Recap. The goal. What was the goal you're trying to achieve? Whatever it was, then the conflict, what was the conflict or problem that held you back from achieving the goal? Like, why are you not able to do it in the beginning? Then the decision, what decision did you make that allowed you to reach the goal? Finally? And what does that journey look like after the decision? And then the transformation, biotransformation did you achieve as a result of your decision and journey? Okay. And now you need to think of it like this. If you have a client, like if somebody comes to you, who you are coaching, for example, you can tell him, man, you have the same problem like me. You have the same goal like i-hat or like like this. You have the same goal like I have had, and you have the same problem like me. I can show you which decision you have to take. And I can show you the Czerny you have to go through in order to get through to this transformation. I am here now. I mean, so basically you can help people making the same decision and making are going and going through the same Charney to get the same transformation you achieved. And this could, for example, be an offer you have, or you can say like, I helped video editors make the decision to become a good editor and going through the journey of learning the sales skills, learning how to say no. And you will have the transformation. I have. Okay, That's basically a good story to tell. Tell your story, but make it relevant to your audience. I've made it relevant to them. Like say, like if you take the same decision, like IT I took, you will go for this journey. I can help you go through this journey and you will achieve this transformation which I received, which I achieved. And that's going to be a story that people will relate to because they see themselves inside. And then I want you to help them. 8. Brand Identity Overview: Okay, Lesson 8, brand identity. Now we're transitioning from your internal branding to the peak of the iceberg, which is the external branding. What people see, which is your brand identity. A minimum of a brand identity in my eyes, should be a logo, like your personal logo, a color palette that may consist of a primary, secondary, and even tertiary color, and also a neutral color and a typeface, or also some people call it font, but actually it's a typeface, which is a brand that typeface which you will use on your Instagram posts on your YouTube thumbnails, just a typeface that is reserved for your brand. 9. Logo Creation Theory: Okay, We're here at less than nine, which is local creation. And they want to give you some basic principles. First of all, good local designers modify simple fonts, a clay. This is what we are also going to do. And please, I ask you to resist or decorating your logo. Many people think that logo must be very nicely decorated so that it is special. This is a wrong thinking because it will weaken the impact of your logo and it will also make it hard to see when it's in a small size because it has too much detail. So please resist our decorating your logo, if any kind of flowers or anything. I really don't think it's necessary. Okay. A basic simple logo will do more for you. We're going to take a type face, okay? And we're going to modify a typeface or font, whatever you wanna call it. And I want you to be a vampire, that different typefaces can convey different feelings. Okay? So if you, for example, want to have a very elegant and ceremony IQ brand recommended to go with a typeface that has serifs like this one, okay, this is an elegant logo. If you're more like of the friendly type, I recommend you to take one that has like rounded shapes, you know, which is a bit softer and the bit friendlier. If you're more on the reliable site, a slab serif typeface could be great, which has this thick and okay. Or if you're more of a tech person and Mono typeface, like this one where all the characters have the same widths like in the coding programs, could be cool because it's kinda conveying these technical feel. If you're for children or mothers or something like this. Maybe a very childish also soft like the friendly one typeface could work well for you. Or if you're really creative. One of those modern sans serif typefaces, creative typefaces could work for you, okay? I just want you to be aware that when you take a typeface will have a feeling which it conveys. These are probably the main or like something to watch out for. Okay. And we are going to create a verge mark together. So I want you to give some examples of avert marks, like simple verb marks, which I once did as a template, which I find look good. Or for example, the royal beauty like this is again a sans serif typeface. If, well, little serifs in a way, special typeface, I like it a lot. Then I have Brandon's dark. This is more of a male brand, very solid. I used capital letters and you can see it's sans serif modern typeface. Okay, Then on the other hand, we have Olivia, Which is like like lettering, like calligraphic, like very female soft. This could be like for wedding stuff, kind of stuff for summer brand. I would say like I'll leave you to find your passion. This should be like an inspiration for you that you can imagine where you could fit in a crime. Then I have Maria medullary, which is a weightless coach. Also nice serif typeface. It has these little serifs at the end. Then Marlin, a writer, and spiritual rituals, your daily meditation practice. Yep, our examples from me, I hope they can inspire you. One thing I want to mention is it's great to take your own name as a logo because then people, when they see the local de directly know what it is about. Because alternatively, you could use a symbol that though Pfaff a symbol here somewhere. No, I don't. But if you use a symbol, people first have to learn the meaning of the symbol. For example, the swoosh from like, they have to learn that this is actually NYC because the tape just see the swoosh and the like is this, what is that? Is that NYC? And for Nike it works because it's a worldwide, very non-brand. But for you, nobody knows, you're probably not too famous. World big print. So taking the name is really smart choice because like this, people don't have to learn it. Okay, So next up, I show you how you can find the typeface and modify the typeface and export your own logo. 10. Create your Lettermark: Okay. As you might see, it's getting a bit darker. I don't know if you noticed, but it's already evening, so it took me some time to record his course. Now that you've had a bit of theory about logo design, we're going to design our own logo. And I already pulled up Google Fonts because as you're doing a letter mark, we need a typeface. And Google Fonts or fonts.google.com, which is the real URL, is in my eyes the best source to get free typefaces because they are high-quality, Most of them. And also you will not have a license problem, okay? So you need to deselect a typeface that you think that fits to your brand, whether it is a San Serif or a serif typeface, whether it is like more modern or a classic typeface, you need to do the decision by yourself. Because there are so many typefaces you can see it's 1358 families which they have here. I made a list for you of the best ones. You find it in the attachment. Here are the best sans serif typefaces, the best serif typefaces, and also the best slab serif or moral typefaces, which I find really good so that you don't have to scroll through all 1000. I would recommend that you just choose one from this list quickly google them how they look like. I will now create a logo for a digital person. Like it could be a coder or it could be somebody who is just like a bit digitally interested. So my choice will be more futuristic or more, well, just cyber typeface kind of thing. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to search for a Mono typeface. So what I do is say, use the sort function here, monospace, because monospace always reminds me on a digital feeling. And I scroll through. In my case, I will take, see what they have. I will take JetBrains, mono. I find this one cool. I already know this typeface. Then you can click on it and you can download the whole family. So it's asking me if I want to save it as a yes. And after you download it, it will show up in your downloads here. When you double-click it, it will unpack. And when you open the folder you see JetBrains has two font files that are variable, and it also has a bunch of static font files I recommend you to. If you also have it like this, I recommend you to install all the static ones on your machine, either by right-clicking into and installing it if you're on Windows or if you're on Mac, just drag them in the fonts library folder. Assume I actually, I'm not sure if it's already installed. So I open up my fonts tool. Exactly. So it looks like this. In determining shrift in some lung. Here are all your fonts inside. Just search it on your, on your machine, and then you can drag all of those inside. It's going to take few seconds and then they should be installed. I think it's already good. It has a small error because I think it works if it works. So next thing, after you have installed the font we want to use, we need a design tool. In my eyes, you can take any design tool you're like, if your confidence with convolved Photoshop or Illustrator, you can use those. I recommend to use a vector based design tool if you know what this is. If you don't know what cells are not that bad. I recommend you to use Figma. If you have no idea which one you want to go for. Figma is free and it's easy to use. So you can just download it for free and get started. I already downloaded it. I don't need to show you how this works. I think you can figure out yourself. And when you start Figma, you can press on plus 2, desire to create the new design file. That's what I do know. It takes a bit of time because my computer is now really working. Because it also has three quarters video. I hope it doesn't take too long. Okay, great. Once Figma is opened like this, once you have your new file opened, you press the keyboard key a. And then here on the side, you can choose different art parts. That's why it's called a. And I always choose the A4 for logo design because A4 is a paper format, you can also use the latter format if you. More confident with that. But I take the A4 and now I use the text tool and they just type out, Well, my own name, this is the easiest monorail, Huisman. And I said I want to use JetBrains more nor as a typeface, so I quickly search it here. Shut rains, mono, very nice. It's directly showing up. So this is basically my name in tech brains mono. If I didn't want to over-complicate anything, I would just take this here as a logo, export it and done. But I want to show you a few tricks how we can make your logo more interesting. So I make this smaller by double-clicking the edge, and I duplicate it by holding Alt and dragging it down. So trick number 1, which always works very well for logos, is to make the first part of your name in a thicker weight. So instead of when we can choose semi bold or bolt, I choose semi bolt first. I think that's not bad. Now I make another version which is a bit more extreme, one with which I use bold. Let me check. Okay, I almost see no difference to be honest, than another trick, like designer is already cool. And other trick which you can use is to make everything capital letters. So you can go here on the three dots and then say this here, uppercase. Then you have L, the characters in uppercase. And if you decide to do that, I really recommend you to space them a little bit about because uppercase characters neither bit more spacing in between them. For example, like this, okay? And another option which we would have that sometimes also looks cool, is to stack the name on each other because I quite have a long name. So what I do is I pull it down. I make actually two copies of it. In the first day, delete my last name, and in the secondary least my first name. And then I stack it like this. Okay? And now I would like to have both the same length. So I go here in the scale tool and they just scale the lower part of the logo a little bit together, are a little bit closer than it would look like this. You can do it very accurate. Series of bit, a little bit off. Let me see. Okay, it's kinda difficult to shift it around, but it's okay. So I leave it like this. I don't want to waste your time going into the details. So I would say if we if we number it okay, option one would be just making one bolt, one fin. Option two would be making those uppercase, and option 3 would be stacking them on each other. These are all things which I recommend you to test out and to see how they look like, okay? Then another thing which you can do if you really want, it doesn't have to be is you can integrate a shape. For example, I could take this option here and drag it aside and try to make or something if a shape. So I take for example, an ellipse. An ellipse are currently trending. I don't know why, but people somehow loved them. I give it a bit of a stroke here and they remove the fill. And actually, let me see if I can do 0.25 stroke. I can do that. And some people like to use those ellipses and put them somewhere. Let me see how it would look like to do like experimental like this. We could say this is the universe or something. We can give it some meaning. Or now that, that I see it like this, maybe it would work better if I also touched those two from each other. So it take the last name away. And I put it a bit lower, for example, like this. Okay. And just the ellipse again with the arrow keys of it. I guess it's just a question of trying around and trying out or to like a claim. I would recommend you to not do more, like try these four versions. Try making one Baldwin thin, try making them uppercase. Try stacking them on each other, and try the ellipsis. Here. Of course, you can also say you want to have both the same weight again. So I make this one also semi bold. For example, I think this was Al-Qaeda's is Paltz, I make it semi bold as well. So that could be a aversion. And then you just pick the one which you feel most comfortable with. All are good because they show your name clearly. I think in my case. I take the last one here. I like I like you to have this shape, okay. I'll take this one, number 5. So what you do is you, you mark off like you mark it like this with your mouse. Then you make a right-click and group it. Because then it becomes one, okay? And then you want to export it to just go here in the corner. You press on Export. You want to export the PNG file format because this has a transparent background. And you choose, I would say for x because then you offer high resolution and you just export the group, the whole group. I just throw it in the downloads quickly. I name it, logo, some pool by animal. Climb. And quickly have a look at it if it worked fine. Let's see. So that's my logo now, I like it, That's perfect. So in next lesson, we are going to cover colors. 11. Select your Colors: Okay, Now it comes to selecting your brand colors. And in order to make it really easy for you, I created some templates like this is like a gift I give to you because took me hours to come up with those color templates. You can find them in the course material folder. You just open it and navigate to color templates. Here we will find 36 pre-made color pallets, which you can just use for yourself. I already opened them here. And what I recommend you to do is to start with the first one with the autumn palette. Just go through all of them and feel for yourself which one fits you the best. I recommend you to take different colors than your competitors so that you stand out a little. And I always find it cool when people have unique colors. Regarding color psychology, That's really a big thing I would say, because some people select colors according to the psychological meaning, color has. I personally don't like to do that because the psychological meanings change from area to area. So a color that means peace in Europe, can me something else in Asia or in America or Russia or I don't know what, it really depends on the culture. So I wouldn't care too much about color psychology. I would mainly care about not having the same colors like the competition, having colors that look nice and that you like. I think if you decide like this, you're better off and going hours into psychology. And then in the end, taking an ugly color palette or taking the same color like your competitor. So just go through those palettes here. One palette that you like and also drag it in your Figma file. I personally, because I'm growing digital brand, I'm kind of looking for a bit more cyber color. Let me quickly go through it. Tear all the summer don't fit. Nice. I have on this red one here. This one I like this looks for me a bit more digital, a bit more like modern came. So what I do is I remember the name, it's neutral to where is it? Let me quickly check here. Neutral to write. I direct this side. Then I open Figma again. I zoom out a little bit. Okay, What I do is I make a copy from this art part by holding Alt and dragging it to the side. Then I delete all the local drafts I made here. And also this one, I only keep the one I really want. Okay. So just to clean up my Figma of it. So that's the logo. Okay? And then I drag in the color palette and give me a second. I need to find it again. Course Materials, color templates, and neutral to license. So I drag it in here. Okay, It's kinda huge, so I make it a bit smaller by adjusting it here on the corners. Okay, Now it's nice. And what I want to do now is I want to sample the colors from this palette. There are only three colors, so it's going to be easy to sample them. In order to sample them, I create a rectangle. So I just create a small rectangle here by holding shift. So it has even sizes or even length, okay? Then we've all, I duplicate it three times. Okay? And then the first rectangle, I go to the color, heuristic color. I press on it. And I go on the eyedropper tool and they sample the first color. Then with the second one, I do the same. I press here on the color and a sample with the eyedropper tool, the red. Then I go here on color and I sampled the light gray occur. Then this year I keep because it's kinda nice example how the color would look like on a website. All palettes that I created are also kinda proved to work well on websites because I always made a small layout to show with the colors work for buttons and backgrounds at anything. So you're going to say if, if you choose one of my templates, here, I now have my logo and the three colors from the template. If you now want to use the colors in your app side, let's say in Squarespace or on Canva, you can just press on it and Figma will give you all the information you need. So when you go here, use for example, see the hex code. You can also have the RGB code, or you can have the HSB, which I sometimes use. So what I recommend you doing is copying the hex code. Okay, I like it. Quickly copy it and write it to your color. So I take the text tool again and copy the hex code in here. And I also add a hashtag in front because hex colors usually half a hashtag or are annotated with a hashtag. As you can see, my feet, most of it's struggling. Not the problem. Then I'll also go into gray color quickly check or tax code this has copied in. And I do the same for the dark background color, which I have here. Okay, I see. Okay, Nice. So that's my little coral color palette. It's gone over. Well, I hope you can follow along on next. We will care about the typefaces. 12. Select your Typeface: Nice. We're almost at the last lesson, which is selecting your typeface. You can go again back to the folder which I gave you here, the course material folder, open it up. And for the typefaces, I also created you different templates. I think it's in total 17 flights, really nice. All of them are very well and carefully down type pairings. So mostly they use two typefaces paired together. And they also gave them names in order to kinda tell you what those are. Faces, expressionists, so that it makes it easier to you to select one. So for example, for my brand, which is now more a bit and bit more digital, I want to have more of a realistic or modern look or more of a professional look. Probably I don't go with elegant, okay. And they can quickly have a look at those type pairings. All of them have are if we followed them, I tried to put the type in action so you can see how it would look like on a website, for example. So here you see one typeface as a heading, and then the other one would be the paragraph. And you can also see I'm like how you could use them as titles and paragraphs and subtitles and all the weights. In this case, this is the typeface, Playfair display and fetus and switch I combined together. But I think they're not working well for my brand which I'm creating here. So I'm quickly having a look at some others this year already, like Mars, Source Sans Pro and source serif. Let's see what they have here. Ibm serif and IBM Plex. That's really cool. I actually think and going with this one, because I know it's IBM's typeface and IBM is like take enterprise. So I'm going to take IBM Plex and IBM Plex Sans. What you can do is you track these aside again and choose the color, the typeface palette, or typeface combination rather at which you want to use. I drag it in here. Okay, Make it gets smaller in like this. Put it aside of the color palette which I already created. And then I know I want to use IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex serif. 50k mal das already have most of the typefaces pre-installed. Okay, So you can kinda go and check here quickly if it's available. So I do IBM, mourn old I have, I'm not sure if I want this, but they have IBM Plex sons, that's great. It quickly. Gift is also the correct name. I be pollex sons. And the other typeface would be the IBM Plex serif. So here again, search it is. Here. You can also see the difference the sans serif typeface house know that if the serif typefaces does have some serifs, in case you wouldn't find the typeface here pre-installed in Figma. You just open up Google fonts again, which is here. And then you go back to Google Fonts and to just quickly search for IBM. Ibm legs more noise only showing because half the fields that are available. So I want to have the sons and the sans-serif as well. And you just download them again here under download the family, I'll install it on your machine. So that was it with selecting the type face, very easy. Just use my preset templates. This will save you a lot of time and they are, well, are they worked well together? So you will also have a professional look. And in the next post, in the next video, I'm going to show you how I would design an Instagram post with this brand guide lines I have created here so that you can see it in action and kinda understand how everything works out in the end. 13. Bonus: Insta Post Creation: Okay, now I show you how I would create an Instagram post with this small brand style guide we created. It's really small brand style guide, but it will be enough to get started. So in order to do an insert or post, I press a and I drag out a frame and in-frame for my post. And it must have the correct size for Instagram, which is a width of 1080 pixel, you can just type it in with hearing the width field and the height of 1350 pixel. Hi, I'm Hannah. You can also name it like in post them and play. Okay. Then for my post, I would like to have a dark background. So what I'm gonna do is I go to my colors and I just choose the dark color, which I have here. You can actually also save colors in Figma, so you can press on it. You go here on the dots, you make plus and two here, the dark one. And then I also quickly save the red one. Go here, cone the plus and make Rhett rat. Okay, if you mistype like me, then you can also edit it. It's not a problem. Red. And also the light gray quickly save because it makes everything easier. Cray, right? I have the background Mao. And what I want to do is I want to have a title for my post. I will now just write. Watch my new Skillshare class for example. So I make size of a 100 pixel and apply it. Canceled it. Watch my new skills, her skill. Share class. Like this. And now I need to decide which one I am going to use, which typeface. If I'm going to use that plex serif or the Plex Sans though from those two for titles, I always want to use the sun's version. So I quickly switch here and there you go, two sons, okay? And because this now looks a bit dull, I make a little arrow. I think the arrows are here under arrow. And I make an arrow pointing to the next slide. If you hold Shift, it does lock it in 45 degree angles. So I hold Shift and I give the arrow color, which I already saved, which is the red. Think that's going to be good and I make it a bit fat so that you can also see it. Maybe eight pixels would be nice. Undying, right? This is what you're going to learn. This is what you will learn a lot. It's only a subtitle. I put it on 60 pixels and actually give it now, instead of the sun's typeface, I give it the serif typeface. I find it's a cool combination. The comb. So put it like that, That's great. Then what is missing in this post is my logo. So what I do is I just drag my logo here. I make sure it's aligned. If everything that's important, they make it a bit bigger. And then the colors, I guess I just use white. So I put this on white, woo, as a problem. It isn't scale it properly. So what we have to do is we have to quickly Ungroup to Logo. And here the typeface I want to outline as a stroke, as well as this year out, I want to outline as a stroke both because then they become vectors. And this here also outline as a stroke. Then I group it again together and this time it should not be a problem with the scaling theory and make sure it's aligned and scale it up. Let's see if it works. Make it white eyes this time it worked. Alternatively, I could also have used the scale tool to be honest, like, then I would not have needed to turn it into. Outlines time. Then next what I want is to have a small, small annotation here on the bottom saying at Manuel Huisman. And also obvious missing. Underwrite monorail. And I make it really small, only like 30 pixels, that would be enough. And instead of all I use, I use regular, That should be fine. Then I drag it down to the corner. Claim. Let's see like this. So this could be a great title slide. This year in my eyes can get the bit bigger than a 100 pixels. So notch it up a bit. Like it's on Skillshare has double L Also like the typing. Okay, watch my new Skillshare class. This is what you will learn. And then I just copy this by holding Alt and dragging it to the side and create another template this time with a light background. So I go here and choose a light gray. Actually, I see with this year it didn't choose my brand color. It actually chose pure black, a mistake I made. So I want to have here dark. My brand color does actually also looks way better than pure black, to be honest. Don't like, didn't like the pure black. So that's cool now. And here I said this is what you're going to learn. So I am making a small list. The list has to be dark, so I make it in dark color under say, well did we learn in the course? Well, we learned create or define your brand car is add, right? The fine. Your rent are. Also exactly. Find out what makes you unique. I first read it. Tell your story and forth. We did create your visual identity and the eye then the spelling is not really my strength. Here. Find your shorten this a bit, your unique less. And the arrow is not needed anymore. It delete it, this down here. I also make the dark color and the logo. I also making the dark color. Okay. And this would then be a brand that post. Okay. I think that's looking great. Let's say you have chosen another color palette. I quickly or, or actually no, I don't do that. I was thinking I show you another example, but I think this is enough. Otherwise the video is getting too long. So next stop will be the last video of this course. Well, I'll give you a summary and then everything is done. 14. Outro: Okay, Nice. That's the last video of the course. This is the first course I ever created. And your feedback would really mean a lot to me, especially because it's the first course, as you might understand. Also, if there is anything I didn't explain that right. Or you didn't understand it, just reach out to me. I would love to create a better video for you because my goal is just to make the course as good as possible. So if there is anything you don't like, don't be like unwieldy, the shitty chopped, they're just reach out to me and I will make another video. The best way to reach out to me is my Instagram. I'm most active tear such as monorail dot Huisman, and just drop me a message. Also, you will find some more branding posts. If you're like, starting from next year, I will post more about UI UX design. So not branding anymore, but still in my history here, you will find a lot of content. Then Savella as that, I would like to have a look at the PDF I created for you. Because please, please download the course materials. In the course materials you find the color palettes and the topography templates and also these worksheet. Here is just again, a summary of all the exercises I would like you to go through, like the goals you have, the value exercise, the purpose statement, the characteristics, the competitor analysis, the transformation statement, the how to tell your story. And also here in the end, a quick summary of the tools are used and the typefaces I like. I think this is, I think you can work with that. Then if you don't feel confident with anything you've created, I think you can just upload this to this Skillshare course and they can give you a review. Or you can also just kind of write me on Instagram and be like, Hey man, well this is my story. Do you like it? Do you think it's interesting? And I like to give you feedback because in the end, we're all humans and we kinda need to take care for each other. Yep, that's it. And hopefully see you in another course from me.