I’ve always believed in the importance of a logo to reinforce my personal brand and that of my companies. If you go on my personal website, you’ll see my name as a logo, with distinct colors that match the rest of my website. That logo, the font and the colors are used on my website, in my marketing collateral and even on my invoices that I send to clients. By using the logo everywhere, even on some Instagram posts, and on my podcast, people get familiar with me and recognize my content quicker. In this way, I use a logo for identification purposes. When people see the brand, they know it’s me and they know the work is going to be quality – it’s a promise of quality to viewers, followers and consumers!
Your personal brand logo should intrigue, remind and reinforce your style and value, not be necessarily used as a sales vehicle. A logo is the centerpiece of your brand identity because the colors, fonts and styles you use are captured in everything else you do moving forward until you make a logo change. Through the design features of a logo, people can build an affinity with you as a professional, entrepreneur or person. This understanding makes them more inclined to reach out to you. When you take yourself seriously, by creating a personal brand logo, other people take you just as seriously.
The qualities of quality logo
- Simplicity: You want people to easily recognize your logo so if you make it too complex, with too many words and colors, it won’t be memorable. Think about Google or Apple’s logo, they are both simple and clean, which also makes it easier to apply them to anything you’re doing.
- Relevancy: Don’t let your logo stay stagnant forever, try to reinvent yourself and your brand over time.
- Memorability: The best logos are the ones that you can’t forget and the ones that appear everywhere. The more you see something, the more you recognize it and it gets implanted into your memory. You associate the logo with the personal behind it immediately.
- Uniqueness: Of course other people may have the same name as you, especially if your name is Mike Smith (my friends name!). But, even if you use your common name as part of the logo, you can always make it distinct by the font, size, colors and design. Don’t let your common name prevent you from having a logo that can be uniquely your own.
- Attractiveness: In today’s extremely crowded world, everyone has a personal brand and therefore we are all competing for attention like crazy. That’s why, you need a logo that grabs attention, while communicating your core values in an authentic way. With our short attention span, it forces us to make a big impact quickly. And yes, people judge a logo like they judge a book by its cover. There’s rarely a second chance to make a first impression.
- Scalability: At some point in time, you may want to blow up the logo to make it large enough for print. Before you try to create a logo, or hire someone to do it for you, please keep this in mind. Make sure that the logo can be enlarged so you could use it for posters and banners. By having scalability in mind, you won’t have issues later when you decide to use the logo for other purposes you may not have thought of today.
How to create a logo
When I was first starting out building my personal brand, I created my own logo. I actually did it on a lunch break while working at a big company. At the time, I didn’t have a budget to hire someone and I had some creative energy that I wanted to use. The first thing I did when I wanted to create my logo was to get some inspiration from famous logos like Coca Cola and McDonalds. So I went on my friend’s websites and looked at the biggest brands in the corporate to see the choices they made and why they were so effective. Back then, there wasn’t an easy way to create a logo so I did it myself.
While creating a logo on your own can be fun, if you aren’t a professional but want to be taken seriously, you might need to get help. Even if you don’t have any budget at all for the project, I have good news for you. You can now design your own logo with the Wix Logo Maker. By answering just a few questions about your business and personal style, it will create a logo design that makes sense for you. It allows you to customize the font, color, size and text to fit your brand and you get the rights to it, which is awesome. Once you’ve finished creating your new logo, you can download the files so they can be used for a number of different purposes, including social media, your website, business cards, flyers and much more.
Have a logo is a central part of building a personal brand. It makes you appear more professional and you end up taking yourself more seriously just by having one. It doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive either. Get started today!