The Personal Branding Process for Creative Freelancers

1. Class Preview: follow the entire process for creating your personal brand for a freelance business. This glasses for those aspiring creatives that are wanting to go freelance with their skills but are needing to develop that personal brand to make yourself not only looked professional but to help you land clients. This course has a special focus on creative freelancers, so graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, Web designers Anyone who has a creative skill set is wanting to take their skills freelance or find jobs. Way will review the entire personal branding process and look at successful personal branding for creative freelancers. Also then craft our brand stories with a focus on creating your biography and essential items needed to start crafting your visual brand. We will then create our inspiration boards to help us find our style and help us derive or color palettes. Next will walk through the brain storing process of creating our visual brand and identity and talk about how to create brand assets. To help us create a brand board and branding standards document. We walk through the creation of a letterhead and a business card and study the why behind certain layout and design decisions. This is not a software driven class. This course is theory based, and it guides you through the entire process so no soft border is required to enjoy the class. Personal branding is the essential first step in creating a stellar strong portfolio and website. After this class, additional classes and lessons will be added to take next steps and adapting our brand to both online and PDF portfolios. So let's get started and creating a stellar personal brand that exudes your own style and flair. 2. Personal Branding Theory: this section will set the tone for the rest. Of course, as the personal branding aspect will be where we find our inspiration for the look, feel and message we send to our potential clients. The copper writing we create during this process can be used later on when we craft our portfolios and website. The logo created can be used on all materials we produce, including the invoices will be creating together as well. Branding is at the heart of any freelancers journey, and that's why, after we set our target markets and our goals, this is the next natural, essential step. First of all, what exactly is a brand and had a brands differ for freelancers and individuals and for larger corporations, a personal brand consists not only of the logo and symbol, but the freelancers, personal story experience, history, personality, unique selling point color palettes, stationary look, apparel, digital assets, portfolio styling and website presentation. Who? That's a lot, but your brand touches every part of your business. Think of the branding as an extension of yourself and your skill set. This means it may be more than just visuals. It can also be how you write your bio, the words and personality you bring and also how you present your work and the colors you choose. Strong personal brands exude consistency and everything they produce, even without a logo. You know, just by looking at the copyrighting styling personality who it might be, your personal brand should be unforgettable. Remember, people looking at your portfolio website will be looking at many more your brand. It can play a porton part of making you look polished and professional and helping you land the right clients with matching goals. I want to review the characteristics I see of strong personal branding. First of all, they have personality. They echo the freelancers, main talents and skill sets by presenting the freelancers unique style on full display. You want to attract clients, but you also want to find clients that will match with your style, not only to benefit the client's needs but defined projects that are fulfilling and rewarding for you as a freelancer. They are adaptable. Their logos and local marks can be used on all things and maintain the same quality. This includes small social media images, fabric, Khan's business cards and even email signatures. They make memorable experiences. They leave impressions on the viewer or potential client, not only in how they show their work, but how they craft their stories and explain their projects. They show a high level of professionalism. This means great grammar, spelling and sentence construction and all text shown their photos and photo worlds Resolutions are cropped properly. They present themselves in a professional manner and even in casual communications like email and texting, they nailed their target market. They appeal and define their target markets the way they build their logo down to their color selections. They know and understand how to appeal their target clients and their viewers. Now there were reviewed some fantastic examples of personal branding for freelancers. I now want to review the process of the personal branding timeline. It could be broken down into four main stages, crafting this story, creating the logo, creating brand assets and finally putting together your digital presence. We're going to work through a lot of these steps together. In this course, you can download this documents who can take a detailed look at some of the natural stages in the personal branding process. You do not have to complete them all, Not all freelancers. We're going to need a T shirt or certain social media graphics, But think of this as a general guide and it thinks about all aspects of the brand. I'll see you in the next lesson as we work on the first section, which will be crafting our story. 3. Crafting Our Story: Each freelancer will have their own unique story to tell, showing off her style but also what has made you who you are as a creative and it could be helpful and selling yourself to potential clients finding clients is like dating and showing your true authentic self goes a long way in finding clients with a foundation rooted in trust. We want a craft, her story with their skill set in mind. What inspired us to become creative artist, designers, photographers, Web designers? Was there someone who inspired you to make you who you are today? Is there someone who motivates you to go out on your own and make it as your own boss? Be thinking about those questions. We begin to craft our stories together in this downloadable worksheets. First of all, let's get the tough part out of the way. Let's develop a mission statement. A mission statement is a small 123 Senate's description of what you do and you're freelancing goals as an online instructor, an example for minus to teach the world design and interesting and passionate ways by use of video, student challenges and engagement with my students as you could see, it's one longer compound sentence. Some of the best mission statements are quick one line phrases, because being able to reduce your business model until one sentence is a true test of having a simple, viable service or product. Here are some examples of mission statements of larger corporations that are simple unifying, and they explain their entire business model and such a short time effectively. Life is good to spread the power of optimism. They sell motivational T shirts and apparel of varying kinds, but yet they don't mention apparel. They mostly mentioned their main goals to spread the power of optimism. This leaves their company mission statement over open for change as they add new products and services. Their mission statement never has to adopt or change. It's evergreen, as they say. Another example for the company. Uber, we ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion. You'll notice a theme here about not focusing so much on the services, but the feelings, emotions and goals of the company they use. The word opportunity and not once is the word Khar mentioned. It's a car ride sharing company. You think this would be critical in their mission statement. But as they add new modes of transportation, their mission statement never needs to shift or change with it. For Adobe Onley, Adobe gives everyone from emerging artists to global brands everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. And, oh, Bees Mission Statement takes another direction and talks about the unique advantage over its competitors. They mentioned how they're the only ones who give artists everything they need to deliver digital experiences. They do not go on to list how they do it, but just that they do offer such a wide variety of products, and they do it very well. So maybe after all this mission statement research, I should revisit my own mission statement and Aiken simplify it even more. Perhaps I can revise this to focus more on my main goal and motivation unless on exactly how I do that. How about to teach the world design and interesting and passionate ways by providing unique , engaging student experiences? This leaves my business open to change without ever having to change the core values or mission statement. I can use video expanding toe workshops and not once. Well, I have to change my statement Let's head on over to the downloadable worksheets and see if he can craft your own mission statement. Then we can move on to creating and writing our bio and story where we can go deeper into the type and style and methods we use. Try writing your mission statement using little words as possible. Keep it no longer than three total sentences and constantly find ways to reduce the length to say more with less. So now that you read in a small, concise mission statement, we'll get more detailed information about your services. Are yourself and a story and bio bios can be boring or an incredible read your the key qualities. I see a great entertaining and rich bios. They are honest and authentic. This is taken from one of my favorite online design instructors, Aaron Drop Lynn. He's raw and authentic, and its approach feels like a real person that matches his brash spunk and realistic approach to design. They're never too long and difficult to read. I have seen some long freelancer bios in my day, and if it's longer than two paragraphs genuine, do not read the last half. It's the realism of trying to grab people. Some people are more gravitated toward motion pictures, photos and less of text. And that's why crafting and writing a bio that is short, manageable is critical. I try to keep my less than a three minute read that leads into the next one. They get to the point quickly by the end of the third sentence. A great bio already. Communicate several things your name, your main goals and your motivations and what you do. Not everyone list their services on their portfolio. Sometimes the bio is the first time of you, or we'll see exactly what you do and have it listed. Make sure you communicate that quickly if your photographer communicate that in the second or third sentence at the very minimum. Also, if you're a jack of all trades and participate in multiple disciplines, try focusing first on the one that you're looking for clients in. So if your photographer designer Web designer extraordinaire, try focusing on Web design of those of the type of clients you're seeking first and foremost, once your BIOS written, we've already written the bulk of what you will have on your portfolio and Web page. It seems kind of tough at first working through these first the lessons of the course. But once we get to creating riel tangible items and marketing products for a freelance business, the core hard work will already be done. Lastly, we need to write our copy and headlines for marketing. These can be one or two liners that can make great Facebook ad post headlines, Great poster headlines basically copy that could be written to grab people's attentions toward our services that exist on a rod wide variety of platforms. All the above mission statements, bios and attention grabbing headlines and even your services list can also be used in your portfolio or on freelancers. Websites like up work dot com to grab clients of tension. We will be crafting an upward portfolio together, and we'll go into even more detail on how to piece all of this together on the site as well as many other sites. So establishing your values and your culture, this last section will establish our values and culture. Is there something special or unique you stand for? Do you use sustainable paints as an illustrator? Do you donate any proceeds to a charity as a photographer, Do you value hard work and honesty? All of these things play important parts and crafting that brand story because it's not a just about who you are, but what we stand for and also the type of work culture we want to represent. Work culture is for more than just larger companies. It could be for a single employee business like you as a freelancer. Also, freelancers rarely work alone in the long term. There's usually collaborations that happen when you start to take on larger clients, how you work with those and other individuals and client's consent, the tone for your company for years to come. Once again, working through this worksheet can get a lot of the hard work out of the way now. So when it comes to creating those many promo items will create together in this class. It will go much, much quicker now that we have processed through all of this. Now that we run down our story bio, another necessary text. Now it's time to focus on my favorite things about branding the visual side of things and the inspirations behind it. 4. Creating Our Inspiration Boards: where one step closer creating our visual brand and logo inspiration boards or mood boards is another name. Our ways of gathering photos, colors, textures to put together a tapestry of what we think best represents us as a creative freelancer. These photos come make up ones you can download for free online, like from pixels dot com. These images can also be your own artwork. If you're an artist or an illustrator or even a graphic designer, that could be your favorite typefaces or fonts. They could even be. Textures are metallic colors you think best represents your style for the demonstration. I'm gonna happen to a program called Camp. They currently offer a free basic account, but I find camp a great way to put together quick inspiration boards. But you can use about any photo editing program you choose. This course will focus less on teaching the actual software and more on crafting the ideas behind creating our personal brands. So I'm here on pixels dot com, and there's tons of free photo up sites you can check out. I'm gonna list that and the resource guide so you could find out all sorts of places you can source your photos for your brand board inspiration. So I'm here right now on pixels, and I'm just kind of flipping through the generic photos. Of course, I can always search and find Tune the kind of photos I'm looking for. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to find what I think would resonate with my own personal style, my own personal brand and my target audience. So I'm thinking about a few things as I'm going through here, and I'm looking at colors as well because we're really gonna drive our color palette and brand color inspirations from some of these photos. So I got to think about that as well. So I'm just gonna scroll through here already. Have a couple downloaded that I wanted to check out. You can also do textures as well. Textures, colors, people, anything that you think would resonate with your brand. It doesn't just have to be a photo. Could be all sorts of different things. So I'm gonna scroll down here. I've got one. Had downloaded that the white brick. I thought that kind of resonated with the style I wanted to kind of an urban style I wanted to go with and just kind of going round. If you like gold, if you like. You know, this is really a personal journey for you, figuring out what you think would resonate. Also downloaded several, um, Leaf are dark nature photos because I really love the greens and I want to see if I can pull out some of those greens in my brand and also purples just anything that I personally like. This is different than branding for a company, because when you brand for a company, you're thinking about the consumer. And in this case we are thinking about our target market. We are thinking about our client, but we're also thinking about our own personal style that we get Teoh portray in our brand . So I'm gonna be over here in Canada dot com. I'll see there in a minute. So the great thing about Camba is their ability to have all these pre made photo templates . We could make a pretty good brand board quickly by kind of dragging those photos over, and they have a free canda. It's not. The Campbell for work is the paid monthly subscription to Campbell, which you get a lot of extra things, but there's also a free version off camera that you can sign up for and do this step. You don't have to use Campbell. I just recommending this as a great tool for freelancers because it's free and easy to use . And it could also create social media, graphics, posters, fliers. There's a lot of great reasons to kind of have a camera account, so I recommend you checking it out. But you could also use photo shop illustrator, any old program to kind of put there, put together your brand board. So I'm gonna go ahead and find what I think would be enough photos to properly represent a brand and pull some colors out. I'm thinking anywhere from 6 to 10 photos. Of course, this is really personal to you if you have 50 photos you really want to pull from. But I'd like to simplify and make this choice a lot easier. So I'm just gonna flip through this and try to find what I think would be a really good layout for my brand board. So I found when I thought that would work really well and I went and uploaded several. The photos that I found that I thought really resonated with Lily and Hernandez is kind of personal brand that were starting to build for her. So she's trying to appeal to She's just getting started. So she's trying to appeal to a broad audience. So not really a specific target yet because she's still trying to develop that. I know she really loves those teals and blue color, So that's something she really wanted to have in her brand. Gonna go and drag a few of these, I think would really work well on this is kind of she likes to brainstorm and sketch out her logos and as a graphic designer. So I thought this would really be helpful. I'm gonna go ahead and find a few others here. I really loved this kind of texture here. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on this. You can really see that texture. And she really, uh, really prefers this orange color. So we're gonna go ahead and focus that cause that could be a chance for us to pull out some secondary brand colors in that particular texture. So you notice how he zoomed in on that because we have it zoomed out, it gets too detailed, and you start to lose the essence of what you're really trying to focus on, and that's gonna be the texture. So let's go ahead and focus on what's the most important, because that's how we're deriving our inspiration from her brand board. Another thing was these dark green nature leaves. That was something that really resonated well, so we can kind of keep that as as is this Robin Blue? There's a lot of blues and Thiel's that we want to maybe derive some colors off of someone's gotta zoom in on this eggs. We can maybe get kind of some of that color out there. Also, this blue door was a huge inspiration, especially because of the teal in that really nice cream color. So that's something we can have in there as a part of the brand theme and also featuring previous artwork or design work or illustrative work or Web design work. Whatever freelance activity you do kind of putting some previous client work in their personal work and also help your brain board because you have a particular style or you have a style you wanna have going forward with your clients, so it's always nice to incorporate some of your prior work, so that could be a part of your brand board. If you already have some personal work or even some paid work, um, you can go ahead. Incorporate that and remember, it could be textures. It could be colors. It could be anything that you find or derived a brand inspiration from. So in this case, that little bit of silver could be something that were inspired by feel free to incorporate . Certain typography are font usage that you really appreciate. If there's a certain way that typography is done, are certain font choice. You can also incorporate that into your brain board as well. Are you catering to individuals or companies? All these factors play a part in the colors we choose. I'm including a color psychology chart to give you a rough idea of some of the emotions and reactions we can evoke with color. Certain colors air stronger like reds and warm colors, while other colors are naturally more calming and relaxing. And I go over a lot of this in detail in my local design, a mastery course, So we have our little brand board that we're gonna get started with. I'm gonna go ahead and bring this into a color dot adobe dot com, which is another great resource. I'm also could include that into the resource list, so feel free to check that out for all sorts of great resource is, this is great, because I'm able to really pick the colors that I need and source that from the photos. I've done this in other classes. If you take in some of my other design classes, I do this a lot when it comes to trying to find and derive colors. Ah, from inspirational photos, as opposed to trying to derive and pick colors out of nowhere. It really is kind of a helpful starting guide, so I'm on color dot adobe dot com. I got to go to extract from Image. I believe this is free to use a so long as you don't need to download anything, but I don't think we need to do that. So once you load your photo and it'll automatically populate with a color palette that they think are the strongest colors. But you can mainly manipulate thes any way you want to go and drag these around and try to find and source the color that way. So if I this a really helpful tool to kind of customizing your color palettes. And let's say they focus heavily on this image and you wanna drag one over and focus on this door, which was really important image for Lillian, so I'm gonna drag that over to the door. You also find off white, subtle color. So if you want to have some whites and creams, you can also maybe drag this over, and he could source a color that way, so kind of get it can like light grey that can help. You kind of choose those colors as well, just a really helpful tool. There's kind of the color palette we have so far, and of course, you can extract using a color mood so you could do colorful, so that would be your colorful colors. I'm your brights, muted deep darks. And of course, none of you could do your own custom so you can go over to color will appear on that were left there just recently redesigned. This whole thing's It's a little bit different, a little bit more efficient. Um, this is the standard color wheel. So this is the color palette that we brought in. And if you scroll down, it will give you all the hex codes and different items that you'll need. So these air hex codes, HEX codes will be important. When you build your online portfolio thes air the codes we need to do to do a digital representation on your website of that particular color. So any time you see a hex code input, this is where you can find those hex codes. You can also do RGB modes and also go ahead and click on some of these and go ahead and give you all of the C M y que and RGB color. So it should be helpful if you're gonna be really doing print and digital items and doing more of the design work with a lot of your stuff. So it's very helpful way to find colors. So when I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and start with hex codes and bringing all my head's has hex codes in the program of my choice, which would be Adobe illustrator and I'm just gonna really put together and finish up my brand board. It looks a lot like this. So that's kind of when I finally came up with in terms of color selection, and it's kind of have some circles there with Put it in, put it in the hex code from color dot Adobe and I was able to find the perfect shade and perfect match for these. So now we have our brand board mood board source, some color ideas. Course none of these colors or final until we get a final brand together, cause as we test out some of these colors when they need to go back and find, too in them and tweak them. Maybe we were a bit aggressive with the orange. All these little things need to be figured out when we actually start to put together our logo and practical branded items. 5. Brainstorming Our Logo: way have our inspiration board or brand board. We could start to sketch out this concepts for a local design. You'll be our main focal point for our personal branding project, since you already defined your target market and created your inspiration board. Sketching out ideas for a logo and picking out our colors and fonts will go a lot quicker. Now that we have a basis of who we're designing for, there are many directions we can go in with their logo design. This class will focus more on the branding aspect and less on the technical steps we need to go through using software. I have many classes that focuses solely on local design and software, like Adobe Illustrator and even free Cloud Brace programs like Camba if he wanted to get into the technical side of do it yourself local design and branding. First, we want to sketch out our concepts and ideas on paper or digital, sketching app before we make it a reality. There's many of you out there that may not have any graphic design, background or experience, and you may prefer hiring a designer to turn your concept into a real vector usable local design. Perhaps you're an illustrator or a photographer or a Web developer, and design is not your strong suit. Hiring another freelancer or designer could be an overwhelming task. So I created this downloadable guide that gives you a lot of tips and tricks on places to start searching for a designer or freelancer and also what to look out for when doing so For those who are graphic designers, this could be helpful to look at, too, as it gives you some great inside and to what other small business owners are looking for. And great designers. If you decide to hire another designer to create your logo, are branded assets, make sure you send them some work we have done prior, including your mission statement, your target audience sketches, inspiration boards or brand boards. Those will be very helpful to the designer that will be helping you craft your personal brand. So let's sketch out some rough ideas on paper. I'm gonna be using a digital sketching app called Procreate, which you can use with your apple iPad, an apple pencil for this demonstration. Why you're sketching out ideas? Think about your target audience along the way are you targeting and high end clientele? If so, that might change the look and feel of your logo. Would your target audience appreciate a detailed, illustrative style? Also, be thinking about the different type of logo styles. When you're sketching, some of you may want to leave this up to a professional designer are try a hand at this yourself if I have a few downloadable resource is one is called the Logo Types and Styles Cheat Sheet, which goes over some of the basic logo design types. Personal branding for freelancers is a bit different than branding for a company that I talked about before. First of all, personal branding his well, it's very personal. It's about you and your unique style and what you're gonna bring to the market. I find the best freelancer Lobo's put the freelancers style on full display, and you can echo similar colors you use in your work like we just arrived from our brand board. In the lesson. Prior branding and logo designed for companies tend to focus on the product or service and a personal freelance branding, we want to focus on yourself in your personality. Remember that being authentic and true to your own unique style, cells yourself better to the right clients. Remember how finding the right clients is kind of like dating. We want to make sure we represent ourselves to the client and the most accurate way possible. And the style you choose for your local design and the layout is a great way to show that style. So what about names? Freelancers can either stick to their personal name, so, in my case, Lindsay Marsh or they can create a freelancer company name. I recommend using your personal name. If you plan on remaining independent with your client worker projects, that means you work mostly with yourself and working in collaboration with others, but not really function as a growing company or agency. For example, I would recommend using a company name are not your personal name. For those who want to eventually grow into a multi employee company down the road, look back at your freelancing goals that you establish earlier. Maybe these could help you decide what might be best for you. The great thing about sticking to your name at first is building up name recognition for our case with Lillian. We could be sticking with our personal name for now. You can also include your official title is part of your logo that could make sure you clearly communicate with surfaces you provide. For example, is a Web designer making sure that is clearly communicated with text below. It could be Assemble an icon, a tagline some way to tell the viewer what you do in your logo. You may even provide multiple services like Web design and photography, and being able to communicate through that in your logo through a type or a tagline is critical and showing a client right away who you are and the kind of services you can provide for them. It's not required, but it's a nice inclusion and a strong logo design for freelancers. When sketching out your ideas, find icon symbols illustrations that can represent what you do and help brainstorm concepts . For example, it could be the pin to Elin Adobe illustrator. For a graphic designer, for example, this is a tool that she used every day in her profession, so it makes a lot of sense of including in her logo, just for an example. Do not overdo it on brainstorming for those of you were wanting to go as far as possible, creating your own logo and branding. Try coming up with three viable concepts you want to develop further using vector software , every logo needs to eventually be created and vector format. There are many great vector programs like Affinity Desire, which is a cheaper version. Or, if you have the Adobe creative suite. Adobe Illustrator. You may also want a higher aircraft designer to take on your rough sketches and create that vector format for you. Affinity designer is that cheaper solution and only costs around $50 just a one time fee for those wanting to give this a try on their own and not hire a graphic designer. You can even put together a logo using camba, which is a cloud based free design tool that allows you to put together simple logos, although it is a little bit limited. So now that we were able to sketch out three different ideas and concepts, I'm gonna go to a step further and make these air reality and vector for back and Adobe illustrator 6. Logo Construction : adobe illustrator right now, and I'm going to vector rises Asset. This is for those who are designers who are already comfortable with Adobe Illustrator and you want to be able to affect arise your idea or your rough sketch. I'm gonna go ahead and start to begin and I'm not gonna get into too many details because then I'll start to be teaching a design class and not a freelance glass. I want to show you a little time lapse of all the steps it took to kind of make this a reality and make it our finished logo. Of course we haven't applied Are color palette yet. We're gonna be doing that next. A little trick when you vector rise your sketch or you make it kind of a real vector logo object would like to bring in my rough sketch. It could be a J peg, a PNG. You can export it from anything. You could take a picture with your phone if you sketch it on a traditional paper or pen and paper and you can bring it in. And I like to put it on its own layer and also like to reduce the transparency a little bit so that when I do start to sketch with it, our sketch on top of it, it doesn't try to get in the way when I sketch on top. So I'm gonna reduce the transparency, gonna go and lock that layer so I don't accidentally move it. I'm creating a new layer to go ahead and Becht arise everything. So I'm gonna recreate everything you circle shapes the pin tool to draw and put the type on here is well, we owe fonts. Typefaces can make or break your logo, for example, noticed these two logo's using different typefaces. One is a bolder sand surf. Whether other one has lighter strokes and thinner lines and has serifis. There's little details at the ends of the letters. It's amazing how just a small font change and a logo changes its mood and style. The serif typeface looks more high end and elegant, while the boulder type choices more approachable. In modern, I have included a downloadable resource called the Font Styles Guide. It will go over some great font type or font choices for certain styles you want to set. For example, if you're looking for an approachable typeface that Cater caters to a younger clientele. Perhaps a few of these font choices my work just some small suggestions out there as there are thousands upon thousands of fonts to choose from Google fonts is a great place to find free open source fonts. We'll talk about photo and fought licensing a little bit later in the course, but just make sure you have the proper license for font usage, which will be for commercial use as you're using it for a personal small business has another quick reminder. All of the links software and external resource is I mentioned. The class will be listed in the resource guide that is accessible in the beginning of the course as a downloadable word doc and PDF. So some suggestions for you with the font styles guide, but you'll know when you come across the right phone for your personal brand. Some personal brands with taglines will want or need to use two different types of fonts. How do you know which to fonts? Pair well together. I've included another resource called the Font Pairing guide, which gives you some didn't general direction on pairing two different typefaces or fonts together in one logo. A few tips while you create your personal brand and make sure that your font choice is very readable and it's very easy for small text to get lost. And remember, your logo may have to be seen at small sizes on invoices, so make sure everything is readable at those small sizes. Try not to use too many font types. Try to keep it to 2 to 3 fund choices at a maximum. Too many will overwhelm, and it could look a little unprofessional in some cases back when you're sketching out your logo, make sure you plan out your logo layout. Do you want to include an established date? Do you want have a tagline? If so, what's it going to be? Do you want your title listed your full name, including your middle name or just your first and last name? The more you include them or other local types might work best for you. For example, a seal logo might work best for a freelancer, for example, whose including three different phrases in your main logo like our example of Lillian Hernandez. You need to think about the logos. Flexibility can be seen very small, but cannot look good in just one color. How does it look printed out now that you have a good basis off your basic local design. Now we're gonna do some brand extension and take that local design and put it on all sorts of items and really create an amazing brand presentation. 7. Brand Assets: good branding takes a more complex logo and can simplify it further to be able to exist on its own. For example, Lillian's logo can be simplified to exist as a smaller icon. For example, we can then take this icon and creative background watermark to use as background for letterheads. This takes our finish logo and takes to the next level branding. Not only do we have a full logo, but we can also develop this. Icons illustrations What they say is brand assets that can be used on our website, letterheads and voices and little creative details and flair to help further communicate our style and personal preferences. Maybe there's a consistent texture that is used throughout all of your materials. There could even be a series of shapes or geometric shapes that are used as common supporting graphics to help to continue to elevate your brand theme across all channels. Are you a designer who focuses on icon designed, For example, you could create an entire series of personal icons and create a pattern background for use on all materials, giving your brand a consistent matching feel. Once again, if you're hiring someone else to create this for you. Make sure you share your thoughts and ideas with them on this Justin example. If you're a photographer, maybe you can share your personal favorite photos, and maybe they can create a background graphic to use the branded asset. Your task is to create several branded assets you can use alongside your logo. This could be a background texture separator bars, for example, or icons you can use. These assets will come in handy as we create your business cards and other branded materials and future lessons. You could start to incorporate some of those headline phrases we developed in the gold section of the class. Those headline phrases will be great for Instagram ands. The business cards will be creating together in the next lesson before we start creating a few example assets for our brand. Holien Hernandez. I wanted to go over a few tips When creating your brand assets. Make sure there's a consistent theme throughout your logo and branded assets. This will make your brand cohesive and interesting noticed similar color usage throughout thes branded elements. Did you notice a similar treatment to the style of typography as well? Make sure these asset elements are in separate files, so you can use them independently for a multitude of situations. This maybe more. For those who hire someone to create their personal brands, you have all the icons of separate files. Some case need to use one when creating another branded marketing material. You'll have all those assets and a nice, neat folder and ready to access. Don't be afraid to be creative. Remember, we're developing personal brands for creative freelancers. Be bold. Find your style and maximize it. This is the chance to be creative with branding. Not everyone gets his chance as the only limits you set are the ones you set for yourself. So now we're gonna create a braiding standards manual for our freelancing company. Branding standards are a little bit different than inspiration boards, branding standards, or sometimes they're called branding manuals or guides, outlines and overviews your entire brand. This helps to explain to others who may be creating assets for you how to use your brand assets and logo. It also explains in details your color palette and went to use certain colors. It will show the many different formats in which your logo can exist, including single color, full color and other variations that might be used for different situations. It also show what bond choices are suitable for use when creating your branded materials, including a headline are a larger sized font as well as what fought to use for your smaller body copy. These also show any other branded assets like textures, patterns, icons and more. I find great branding standards. Manuals include a few finished designs, including a business card or social media post. Just to show how these branded assets are being used and how to properly use them. I wanted to show you how messy it is to create all your brand assets in your local design. So this was just the logo concept. Process was really trying to find the right fonts and try to find the right fought peering . It took some time to figure out what colors I wanted to use is Well, I tried out quite an array of different colors. I tried bright colors. I tried to bring out the colors for my inspiration board to try to pull things there, and so I kind of settled on that green teal color that I pulled from the Inspiration Board . But I started to develop icons and patterns, just having an area to play around with and really produced some ideas and concepts for my brand assets. Do you kind of see this kind of mess I created trying to think of some, maybe some icons that I thought really connected with what she does, which is a graphic designer. I just have some basic tools, like lay out the pin tool little typography element there, like she works with type A lot and also kind of the color wheel type area. So just kind of coming up with some generic icons at all. I did this all on Adobe Illustrator. Of course, you can use offended a designer. You can hire a designer a lot of different ways. You can approach this, but I thought I wanted to kind of show you a little bit of the mess that it took. I also made a pattern using the pattern tool in Adobe Illustrator. To be able to create that pattern, I thought would be great to have a really neat branded asset that I can put on backgrounds and in this area. I was still trying to figure out how to best overlay that texture on top. This was kind of what I came up with. I don't think in the end, I ended up going with something a little bit more clean, but just some ideas that were running through my head. I want to kind of show you my raw process because a lot of people, I don't know a lot. Instructors just showed the finish polish stuff, But I wanted to show you the messy stuff because this is what it's like when you're creating brands, it gets messy. There's a lot of different versions and generations you have to go through to find that final design. So this is kind of my rough play area where I'm figuring all this out. I'm gonna take a lot of this and put it together and a really nice brand presentation, and we're gonna be doing that with our brand manual, which is going to be right over here. So this is the brand manual that I settled with. You can kind of see how I have the color palette have the choices. I've found the inspiration there. I'm also including that as a part of my brand presentation, and we have a couple different versions of the logo like we talked about a little earlier. There's a single color version, and it can exist and a lot of different primary colors of the brand so it can exist in the teal. It can exist as a watermark, which is kind of a lighter gray color. It can exist on the back of a letterhead. You could put this very easy to read. Still text on top. So just kind of laying out the different arrangements of logos. And you know what happens is when you start to develop your website, your portfolio, your business cards. You'll start to use this logo, and you might run into some limitations. And that's great because you can always revisit your brand manual and add different versions of your logo. And so, for example, when we create our profile are online portfolio. We're gonna have some limitations with a round seal logo because they don't always fit nicely on a top of a website in the header area. So we're gonna need to create a really simplified non seal version of the logo so we can be able to have multiple applications of our logo, and that's gonna be very common with almost any logo. Not every logo's gonna fit perfectly in that one format, so we're gonna be developing that a little bit later to make sure that we have a horizontal version of the logo so we can work in digital formats so you can see kind of the iconography. Icons are not required. I just like to have them because, you know, it's kind of nice to have a Siris of icons just for this particular person. I found it to be nice and also secondary colors not required. What I did is I wantedto pull for my inspiration board. Some of those colors that I found that were didn't did not end up his primary colors, but I thought, What if, for some reason, those colors are not working out for that particular for matter? Add, you know I don't want to be stuck with these cool colors when I really want to have a high impact color. And so that's why I chose some secondary colors that I thought were alternatives. If I felt like a particular ad needed to be much more brighter and vibrant and eye catching , and so just kind of developing a secondary color palette. And I have the hex codes underneath just so I can copy and paste those hex codes. Whenever I start to develop online assets, I can copy and paste, and I have a document I can go to an easily access. That stuff can further expand on the brand assets, including the background texture I created when you create something settled enough where I can put text on top and it doesn't fight with it too much. And also you wanna lay out your typography plan or your font plan. So what type of fonts can you uses their multiple fonts that you can use in your brand? Is there one you use for headlines? And is there one that use for secondary lines? Is there one you use for body copy if you have long blocks of copy? This is great for your digital website, but it's also great when we create your pdf portfolio and other kind of assets. We can kind of have this set up so you have kind of a font or typography plan so you can literally copy and paste from this area can drag this over you. You know what type face is gonna be? This one's bitten Sands and the soon's commuter Sands light, so I can already have that establish. It's easy for me to go ahead and pick those as I start to develop the branded assets and also application on darker backgrounds. It's always great to think about that. I go through that in a lot of my design courses when we're developing brands and logo designs, how important it is to have your logo be as flexible as possible. That means it needs to work on darker backgrounds or so many situations where you're on a social media site and they have a dark background and you're forced to use it. This is great to have that option. You're not limited. You're not stuck in a box with your logo design. Also, we have invoices. I'm just kind of this is a great way to show kind of how our brand and brand manual can be applied to an actual product. So I decided to come up with a mock and voice. Of course, we're gonna talk about invoicing software later in the class, and there's some limitations with what you can design on some of them. Some of them, like QuickBooks, is very flexible. You can design a really custom invoice and some of them, like ZIP books, which is a free invoicing tool. They'll allow you to change your header. They might allow you to put a logo, but they're not gonna allow this kind of custom look, So But I went ahead and kind of put one together, just in case. And just to kind of help to practice, brand extension and help to kind of show. How do I handle type and text and layout? How do I use the texture? Are there any kind of things that can apply to other branded assets? So in this case, I have this kind of line system here was able to keep contact information was great about developing. This is once we develop a few items. So we're gonna do a social media post and a business card. Next. Once you develop a few items, you can copy and paste a lot of those to keep the same look and consistency. So when you already developed a first wife, I can copy and paste this little chunk of text, and I can easily apply it to a business card. So here's the business card. I applied kind of the same information and kind of the same style with the lines. So we're starting to develop that you can't develop your entire branded campaign without having to do riel projects. So sometimes you have to go back and revisit your brand, and that's okay. That's a very normal part of the branding process is going back, maybe adding a new logo and your style, maybe tweaking something because when you start to apply it to other assets that maybe didn't work. And so it's a back and forth creation process. And don't be afraid. If you kind of messed up and said, Oh, my logo doesn't is not working well there you could find a way to adapt it or have a different version that works on. It's all part of the process 8. Creating A Business Card: So now we need to apply the personal brand to a multitude of items. And this class I'll walk through the creation of two very important items. A business card and a letterhead will talk about the paid and organic social media, post design and other types of digital design A little bit later. In the marketing section of this course, business cards may seem outdated to some. But when it comes to working and finding local clients, having a physical card to hand out really helps with remembering who you are and even jotting down quick notes about your conversation. When we start talking about finding clients, I will emphasize heavily how important local networking is. The business card is your golden tickets is starting conversations but also providing something they can walk away with and remind them to follow up with you. Your task is to create either a single side or double side business card for your personal brand. There's no requirement to what to include on a business card. MMA. Commonly, you'll find basic contact information like phone, email or website. I like to include something interesting about my business. Maybe my main headline or phrase that defines who I am, what I do and how I do it better than the next guy or gal. Business cards are small, so this does not lend itself to big paragraphs of text. So use this real estate wisely to say more with less. There are all sorts of lovely effects you can apply to your business cards, every using an online printing company like mood dot com. You could apply a wonderful gold or silver foil stamping to give your logo or another brand asset a nice high end shine. During the process of creating your first few marketing items, you'll start to work out certain layouts, font sizes for particular things like I mentioned earlier. For example, working with this contact information, I created a unique way of dividing the lines to display the information. This pairs well with the elements in my logo to there's a little bit of a theme there. I could take this arrangement and use that on the letterhead layout or the business card layout displaying the same information. This is gold brand consistency. Using those similar layouts and different situations, remember, use your textures. Icons patterns are other brand assets and find ways to incorporate those to continue that brand consistency. This example I'm using the repeat pattern I created from a few custom icons I created to create that subtle background to complement the logo. Those who are illustrators or photographers may wanna feature your own work paintings, photos, illustrations to show that style, whatever might capture the attention of your target client or make them happy we could start to notice our theme. Throughout the items were creating. We can easily apply this style of many different items. T shirts are a great way to start conversations with people while you're out and about networking or just living your life. I had a brand T shirt with my logo and tagline on it, and the landed several clients just by living my normal life. People are interested in what you are and what you do and what is on your T shirt. They're intrigued by it, and so they ask you naturally, some follow up questions. So now that we developed our logo and some brand assets, what file? Four months do I need to have these in? We're gonna be doing this yourself for hiring another person to do this part for you. This is the four months I like to have my logos or brand assets in, if possible, logos. I'd like to have these in smaller J pegs. Larger P and G's P and G's can have transparent backgrounds. I would like to have these in vector format, so it's simple dot ai or illustrator file or a dot E P s. If using another program is great if you're getting your logo printed at a custom promo items, a vector file is usually requested. Buy a printing company, so it's nice to have one of those on hand. We'll be uploading all of these exported PNG and JPEG files that we have of our brand assets so we could start to put together a sample business card front back. We're gonna be doing that and Adobe Illustrator, but you could put this together in any programme of your choice. Once again, these lessons focused less on using the software as many of you guys will be using different software or some of you will be hiring someone to do these designs for you. I'll focus more on how to extend your personal brand other areas and less on graphic design , as this course is focused on, freelancing and getting that personal brand are ready to go. If you're interested in knowing how to use Canberra and detail on how to create your entire Brandon Camba, I off offer a branding course for non designers. Do it yourself non designers. I also offer courses in all the adobe software. If you're interested in doing all this and adobe software. Okay, we're ready. We have all these brand assets we can pull from, and you're gonna be doing that as you create all the different assets you'll need. You may not need a business card, but you're going to need some kind of contact information, whether it's in the email signature or some kind of way to display all your vital contact information. So let's begin. We have a two sided business card front and back. I went ahead and pulled our headline thing. Wasn't kind a little bit more generic that I'd like it to be this headline, but they're sell well, more that I developed in that brainstorming process in the gold section of the class, where is coming up with some kind of ways Teoh talk about what I did in a one very simple statement. I like to put this in my business card because a lot of business cards will just have kind of your generic contact information. But they don't really tell you how you bring value. Like with my business cards. I do elevate your business through design or something very similar to that. That kind of tells them a little bit what you do more than just your title. So I like to incorporate a little bit more of ideas on a little bit of text. That way, you never want overwhelm it too much. If you can't say in one sentence, it's probably to be too long for a business card. They're very, very tiny. You don't want to overwhelm with text. Another great thing about having all of your branding standards manual developed so I could start pulling all these assets than I need so I can go ahead and pull, you know, logo over. I can also have my type set up, so I know what type of ah ah fonts I should use here for the headline and other information . So it's really just a matter of figuring out what I think would capture the imagination of a client. What do I think would be a proper lay out on the front? The back? I like to have business cards that are front and back because they're really not that much more expensive to get it back these days. And I like to put high quality upgrades and finishes to my business cars, maybe a metallic ink foil stamping and bossing. Um, go to move dot com if you want to get all those fancy effects. But I like to do that just because I don't mind spending a little bit more of my business card because I hand them out very deliberately when I go meet people and I hand out a business card that somebody have had a conversation with, someone I seriously want to pursue as a client, I want to give them my best. Ah, foot forward. I'm gonna give him a very high quality, maybe even a little bit more expensive business card. Maybe even you spend 50 cents even a dollar on the business card that's worth it. A dollar. If you're handing that out to ah ah high quality potential client or lead. So let's continue to kind of fiddle around with the layout. And we're just thinking about ideas. We're not thinking about graphic design. I'm gonna focus more on why, What I'm including and why? So we definitely wanna have that headline over here. We're gonna bring that headline. We don't want to overwhelm people, so I'm just gonna make it a little bit smaller. I'm a big fan of putting the logo on both sides because you never know what side when they take it out of their wallet or they take it out of their purse. You don't know what side they're gonna land on and also like to do different contrast on the side. So instead of have to Whiteside's, I maybe have a darker background and then a lighter background or the other way around. I think it really helps to kind of add to the experience. So you're just adding to the experience. The back of your card could even feature one of your works assed Long was maybe have your logo or water mark mark somewhere on there so they can kind of see that work and see your name. They want to connect your work in your name together. So that's another great thing of your illustrator, especially photographer or even a Web designer. Putting a little piece of your work. A little snapshot on the back, along with your logo really, really, really helps, so you need to make business cards fairly unique. You know, you kind of have the standard layout where you have the information over here, and you kind of have a typical layout. But try to be creative, even though you have to do contact information in a clear manner, and you want to be consistent with your brand, so continue to use the same type faces throughout. Find ways to get it to work. Or if you feel like you're typeface or colors are not working, please revisit your branding, inspiration and brand boards and all that stuff and branding standards and tweak it. This is when you go back and forth in that creative process, so some other things I'd like to include is I'd like to include obviously website that's working. They're gonna drive them to the website. That's the main focal point is not really the email. I'd like them to contact me. But I like them to contact me after they visited my Web site and portfolio because I want to get them sold before the email me so that it would be a very soft sell for two to land that client. They've already seen my work. I don't have to. Then send them to the website and keep going through that. The website. Big, bold, beautiful. That's what we want to have. The website is gonna be very prominent. We could even bring in some of our colors. I'm gonna go ahead and copy and paste my color palette, so I have easy access to it. So if we wanted to go ahead and switch things up, we can. So that will be the main focal points of sometimes putting your website away from the other . Contact information helps especially for doing its own side, because it really helps that user focus more on the website and not get lost among the other contact information and also like to put a very obvious statement. If my header making your small business ideas come to life, it's a little generic. It doesn't actually say that I'm a graphic designer. Although we have graphic designer in her logo, which is nice, I wanted to have a very obvious statement almost like a title. So if you want to say senior graphic designer or senior photographer or art director or illustrator, those were great to have titles. Sometimes I'll put it in a phrase, so offering full service graphic design or I could probably even rephrase that a little bit to make it sound better, but just kind of having something that's it's very, very, very obvious. What you do right when you look at it, you're not playing any games. You're getting right to the point so they can remember. Oh, yeah, she's the graphic designer I met in the elevator. Um, so that's exactly what you want to kind of do. So I'm gonna spend about 10 minutes rearranging everything and trying to find what I think is a suitable layout already kind of did, ah, couple of ideas here with an invoice, and there's already some kind of brand consistency of developing with kind of how I arrange everything. So I'm going to do that and incorporate that to have that brain consistency, and I'll be right back, - so each one of these concepts are effective in their own ways. That's why it's important to put together several different ideas and layouts to find out which one you think would work in some cases, even getting multiple different versions of your business card printed for different situations. The one here on the left who really works well for high end clientele, with this night's gold foil stamping on the bottom and beautiful use of texture. It's very clean, and it reduces all the extra clutter. I don't have the tagline and just focus on the offering full service graphic design as kind of the main focal point on the front as well of the website. So it's very clean, modern and really would do well at attracting ah, hiring clientele. The one on the middle is very basic. It's got the tagline on the top. It's got my basic information, has everything it needs. It even has a little sketching photo in the background, using photo to kind of help draw the user in and explain a little bit about what you do and how your processes different course where a brainstorming design company So I put a little bit of that sketch pencil in the background. I thought that would be a fitting image for what she does is a graphic designer on the bottom. My future, her work on full display. I would hadn't arranged ah lot of her logos in a particular order and was able to kind of put that on the back and, of course, with a big focal point on that website, because that's where they're gonna be able to look at the's on more detail and get case studies, which will be doing in the next section of the class. Creating our website portfolio in our pdf portfolio on the right is kind of more of your everyday use. I think it's kind of, ah, more flexible and adaptable to different situations, kind of your basic front and a very clean back not showing any work or photos, but just kind of showing what needs to be shown for the business card. So three different layout ideas, you know, took about 20 minutes kind of brainstorm this. You can, of course, put this together in any program you like, but that's kind of my little bit of my rough process of how I think about, um, business card and what needs to be on it not necessarily designed but kind of the effectiveness of the card. So once again, you're seeing a lot of two toned contrast. We have a bright front and kind of the opposite, darker back not required. But I just find that higher contrast nice is the user flips the card over. They could definitely tell the difference between the sides. 9. Creating A Letterhead : way we're gonna be doing that. And Canada, which is something I've already kind of introduce you to a little bit earlier in the classes, just easy to kind of whip things together very quickly. So I uploaded all my assets into a folder on camera, and I'm gonna go ahead and die right in, and we're gonna create our business card. So can the has some really great potential templates you can use. I am a fan of using templates. Whatever. It gives you a head start on your designer layout. I'm not afraid of taking a template and making it my own. So I'm gonna scroll through these and there's a lot of different ways to do an effective letterhead. It depends on how you're going to use the letterhead. There's a lot of ways freelancers used letterhead. Some of them put their proposals on them. Some of them right? Personal thank you. Letters to clients. You may think a letterhead might not be super important to you right now, but it's really nice to have one on hand, especially when you do illegal stuff and tax stuff. Sometimes you send an official letterhead to a business or to a government agency to do something. It looks a lot better. And sometimes for certain official documents, they require you to sin letters with some kind of official business letterhead. So that's important to do. Don't write thes off. Same thing with business cards. Don't think they're too old school. Not everything has to be digital. And let's go ahead and dive into here. There's a lot of different letterheads like let's say this template. This looks like it's got all sorts of stuff on it, which might be interesting, but it depends on the length of your letter, and you never know how much letter you're gonna need to write. So I like to focus more on space for the actual letter and a little, a little bit less and all the graphics. I like to have my logo and my name and contact information, and you could have a little element the background. But nothing may be quite as big as this one. Maybe something more along the lines of this over here. So I got a scroll through here and find one that I think will work. I did find one. I'm already starting to modify this a little bit. What I like to do is make sure I can put a long letter there. So if I can scroll this down and fit even mawr, that would be lovely. And it looks like I'll be able to so going to fill that in with my own contact information ? I'm just trying to think what would be a brand consistency, cause we're really talking about branding here a little bit less about design. How can we kind of brand this to make it look consistent? And we can do our little tagline if we want to take our tagline? Ah, from our business card that we just created, we could do the taglines somewhere in there, but the focus really is on your name and contact information and website. This is not always a marketing piece. This is sometimes more of an official business document. Peace and we want to keep it very, very simple. Very, very clean. So maybe less of that extra stuff that we put on the business card. So I'm gonna continue to work on this layout a little bit the same way we did with the business card is trying to find ways to incorporate that brand a little bit more in here. Remember the colors that we developed a little bit earlier in her branding standards manual ? This is where those hex codes air really to come in handy. If I want to bring that into any kind of online editing program, I can go ahead and pop or paste those hex codes in, and we can go ahead and bring in those exact colors. She's always very helpful to get the right graze the right secondary colors. And this is where having multiple versions of your logo really comes in handy because there might be a situation where a different color might work a little bit better than what we have is the default. Yes, it can always have those to test him out. I'm a big fan of water marks. I think they look really good on letterheads and they don't interfere with the text too much. So I'm just gonna be creating that right now. Of course, you want to make sure you reduce the transparency or the color to a very light gray. You don't want to interfere with any text. It'll ruin the whole efficiency of the letterhead, so just kind of reduce it where you think would be a good level. You can always do a test print in your home printer or an office printer and find out what you think. What level would look good, and also it doesn't have to be in the center. It could be on the left or right. Get a little papa name there. It's entirely up to you. So there would go a very, very, very, very simple letterhead. Nothing that's going to win any design wards. But I think it is effective and definitely consistent with their brand. We have a Finnish logo branding manual brand assets, a rough layout for an and or business card letterhead. We also have some several ideas for other items we can create. We're ready for the next critical step into the going freelance process. This is probably one of the most important things we're gonna cover, and that's to craft your portfolio. Toe land clients 10. What's Next? Build A Portfolio and More! : Are you ready to go freelance? Are you wanting to learn everything about how to become a successful freelancer? Are you interested in going from part time to full time are wanting to explore? This is a viable career option. This course is a special focus on creative freelancers are anyone who uses their creative skill sets in their craft? This includes graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, Web designers, UX designers and MAWR, although everyone could get a ton of this class even if you do not use creative talents in your line of work, this extensive course reviews all aspects of the freelancing process, including setting your business goals, creating your list of services and finding your target market. We will craft are freelancing story together to write effective bios, marketing copy and write a compelling mission statement. Way will learn what goes into powerful personal freelance branding will work through the brain storming of a local design, the creation of a letterhead and business card and learn how to create and use branded assets. To make yourself look incredibly professional and consistent. Way will learn the power of stellar port flues and had the best present your work and several different formats, including a PdF portfolio and Web based portfolio will even review had opposed to work to third party websites. Finding clients is the hardest part of freelancing and will spend plenty of time reviewing the many different ways to secure clients online, offline and on. Social media will learn to write fantastic bios and profile descriptions to present ourselves in the best way possible to potential clients. We even spend time creating an upward profile and learn how to use freelancer websites to find work efficiently. Pricing your work is essential to maximizing your earnings as a freelancer, and we'll learn several different ways to price. Your work will go over the benefits and downsides to both hourly and fixed rate pricing will find ways to help us create accurate and profitable quotes and even work through several practice quotes to get comfortable pricing Our work after finding clients sometimes working with clients could be Justus challenging on. We'll learn how to create contracts that properly protect us and talk about up front deposits, project scope and more. We even work through a contract together, and I provide a basic contract as a downloadable resource. We work through several negative client situations and talk about best ways to navigate those common client issues and finally will work through copyright issues As we review best practices for using fonts, photos and graphic Resource is for client work in projects. Managing your income in cash flow is vital to your success. Will discuss wind might be the right time for you to move from part time to full time freelance and maybe even win to quit your job. We also review cash flow basics and how to properly manage your income from month to month . This course is dynamic, and they'll be additional content added to the course. And speaking of downloadable resource is this course has more than Paul. My prior classes, combined with over 100 pages of written content downloadable on the nice bite size resource , is that go along with each section so you can work through the class with videos and resource is adding another level of engagement to this course. Are you ready to start adding value to the world who never thought was possible before? Are you ready to be your own boss or make your current freelancing side gig a bigger deal. I am more than excited and proud to present this freelance masterclass to you today. The best thing we could do is freelancers and stay in community with each other. And that's why all students of this course will have access to an exclusive student Facebook group where they could support each other, ask questions and will thrive together. So you ready to open up your world to freelancing Al, see you in the first lesson. 11. Student Design Challenge - Create YOUR Personal Brand!: Are you ready for a student design challenge? This one is going to be a bit personal. Your task is to create a personal brand for yourself or your freelance business. You may be a graphic designer, Web designer, illustrator or creative writer, but all of us have something personal about us that makes us unique. I want you to create a logo that best represents your unique approach to your craft. This could be with use of color symbols, abstract art or something, and has personal value to you and your business. Branding is more than just a logo. The logo is a small part of this. For the student project, the only requirement is to create some sort of logo and name presentation, but also to combine it with other brand assets. This could be a business card, a simple letterhead or just a simple social media post using your brand and extending your brand out to one item so we can see how this works in action. I would love to see your work, so make sure you post in the community area of the course you're currently taking our post in the student Facebook group or its message Me your work. Remember the following when creating your personal brand number one. Remember that personal branding is hard. It could be very introspective and require you to really think about your style, skill and uniqueness. Number two. That personal brand development is about hitting your desired target audience. What type of clients do you want to attract? Number three that you may go back and forth between lots of great concepts and still not be able to settle on one. That is why submitting concepts to a community can be helpful in helping you think and process through which one might work out best for you. If you want to follow the entire personal branding process, I do so in my freelance masterclass for creatives course that's on both skill share and you . To me, you are not required to be a student for enroll to participate. Everyone is welcome. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with, and I'm expecting this to be a highly active student design challenge with lots of great projects submitted