Building a house for your brand 🏡

Back again with another installment on the topic of personal branding today🔥. If you're not interested in this topic feel free to skip this one. I've had some requests to cover this, so I wanted to go deep on this one.

Anyways...today’s a good day…because today’s the day you start building your brand’s "house"! 🏡

Your brand house goes way beyond a logo.

Your brand's house is a safe, cozy, inviting place that you feel uniquely you, uniquely energized. You are capable of expressing who and what you are in exactly the way you’re hoping to express yourself.

Individual mis-steps don’t matter here. Because you’re building a body of work, and everything works towards a whole picture that is you. You are allowed to change direction whenever you want, without consequences and without blame.

Getting Started

So, perhaps you are thinking, that all sounds great, but how the f*ck do I actually DO that?

It starts with gathering everything that resonates for you about where you want to go…and having one place - ONLY one place - where you look at all of it together.

I want you to take everything that gives your brain a little explosion of “YES! THIS!” and put it on a page. And then you write down a little note about WHY it gives you that feeling, and what you like about it.

For me, one thing I’d put into my brand’s house is a book of Ramin Nazer’s illustration called “FULL ENERGY RECHARGE.” I’d put in a website called The Space Time Generator. I’d also put in a book called “DON’T Do Your Best” by Simone Grace Seol.

These pieces of work gave me THAT feeling when I see them…

Where I’m excited, humbled, charged with purpose…somehow all of those things simultaneously. I could write you an essay on why I like them.

Make sure you put other things besides the visual stuff. Put the lyrics to your favorite song. Grab a transcript from a favorite podcast episode. Write down your likes and dislikes.

You don’t have to know how it all fits into your final brand system yet. Right now, we’re just vibing. It actually works against you to be too analytical right now.

So if you like plaids inspired by Scottish kilts AND you like glittery pink disco balls, go ahead and put them both in. Your likes don’t have to “match.” Playing with tension is fun.

The goal is to get as much of the things floating IN your brain OUT of it, and onto a page.

The result of doing this - it’s going to blow your mind.

Because we’re not JUST building a foundation for your brand work here.

So many of us spend absolutely ZERO time thinking about what WE want, and ALL the time thinking about what everyone wants FROM us.

Putting all your favorite things into one place is a way of listening to your own wants and needs. It’s a way of reflecting the feeling of your own love back to yourself. And, it’s the most amazing self care in the world.

If you start small and you don’t judge your likes and dislikes...eventually what you want and who you are - it reveals itself to you in a freaking spectacular way. It awes the hell out of me every time I witness this. You are a goddamned magical ineffable entity. I can’t wait for you to see it, too. But mostly, I can't wait for your audience and clients to see it!

The nitty gritty "how-to" stuff:

There are many options for where to gather your inspiration.

My favorite tool to do this is Figma, but that may not work for everyone.

You should pick a tool that allows you to copy/paste ideas into it and then jump right into the “design part” because shortening the distance between getting an idea and TRYING the idea QUICKLY is the CRITICAL part.

A bonus is if the software is cloud-based, because then you can share it with other people easily.

Softwares I’d recommend for this exercise:

-Figma (there’s a free version)

-Adobe Illustrator (if you’re more comfortable with this one, go for it)

-Canva (I know folks love this one!)

-Google Slides (the design tools within it are crude, but they exist, and bonus is that you can put animated gifs in here when your inspo is motion based)

Hardware I’d recommend:

Something to sketch ideas with. Paper, pen, pencil, iPad Pro, whatever.

Okay, that’s it for today! The next step will be gathering everything you ALREADY have made for your brand into the same file. Products, graphics, fonts, etc.

TTFN & Happy Thursday :)

-Cathy

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