Personal Branding project is one part of the Personal Development Plan 5 I need to complete this semester and includes creating of personal brand and CV. Before I started to think and do anything about my personal brand, I had to take couple of things on account:

First I was considering my brand name and find really interesting articles here:

• Strategies for Choosing a Memorable Brand Name
• Lesson 8: Choosing Your Brand Name by Bob Baker
• Naming Your Freelancing Business – To Personalize or Not?

There are obviously some disadvantages of using my own name, because its rather difficult to pronounce, spell and remember. But I have no intention to change my brand name every time I cross borders to another country. Plus – because I’m not going to freelance anytime soon, I’m going to brand myself with my own name and with what I really am – Jiri The Designer DD. Thus I opted for my own name. I’m just myself, I’m the image and my brand.

Because I have no intention to freelance in about next 5 years, I had to find out, who’s my target audience and what message I’d like to get across. Than I started to think what am I actually going to create. I already have an online portfolio, I have this blog, so I decided to design a poster-like mailer in the size of A1 sheet folded to A4, containing my CV, introductory letter and showcase of work I’ve done.

My inspiration came mainly from the International Typographic Style a.k.a. Swiss Style. I always loved its simplicity, cleanness and harmony of function and aesthetics.

I started throwing ideas and sketches down on paper, taking advantage of my Moleskines, where I write / draw ideas whenever and wherever possible (I really like doing it on a bus). I had couple of good ideas in mind already and was looking forward to use them.

Because of the complexity of the poster, one of the most important design-related decisions was to choose the right grid. After careful consideration and bit of maths, I decided to partly use the Complex Grid by Karl Gerstner (who designed this grid for his work on the CAPITAL magazine) and tweak it a according to my needs.

Find out more about grid systems

One of the modules I need to complete this semester is Personal Development Planning (5). Though I actually am aware what I’d like to do as a designer in my future and to which part of the design industry I’d like to get in, I found the personal development planning helpful.

The overall idea is to think on the future career path, make decisions what is the most interesting part of the industry I’d like to specialize in, do the research on that particular subject and base the other course design / research projects around it.

It may sound easy, but it took quite lot of time with pencil and my notebooks / sketchbooks making notes and considering my future career paths, skills I will need to build up, knowledge and experience I will need to gain. I did lots of mind mapping, wrote tons of notes… It wasn’t easy, but I have to say even the process itself helped me to realize what I want to learn more about.

I decided to go to the “roots” of design and thus the subject of my choice is balanced mixture user experience and interaction design, followed by visual communication theory.

I believe many designers forget that design isn’t just about aesthetics (though it’s very important), but about how things are operated, how they work, how they bear the message from the sender to the receiver… In today’s web design I can see tons of fancy graphics without purpose and sense, with no creative idea.

I have to admit I was tempted to do a bit more research in advertising (because I really love the research + creative process) and typography (because I love type and I think it’s really great craft) as well, but than I realized that I can’t concentrate on everything. But my love for type and advertising goes on.

So I’m going for User Experience Design & Interaction Design in the Graphic Design in Context module. Please stay tuned, hopefully I’ll update you with some interesting stuff soon.

Design for Diversity was a exercise aimed partly to understand principles of communicating messages to people, partly focused on creative development of an advertising campaign.

We had to choose a campaign we want to focus on:

• Budget flights to European cities for wheelchair users
• National Trust membership for people of Afro-Caribbean heritage
• Twitter to over 65s
• Young people to join the Church of England

and research the target audience: who are they, what do they like, what motivates them, what music do they like, who are their role models and what requirements and barriers are specific to them.

Our group has chosen the “Budget flights to European cities for wheelchair users” campaign. We did interesting research and, apart from other things, we found that wheelchair users enjoy experience that doesn’t have any unexpected surprises. The like to know what to expect at every stage of the journey – at the airport, at the check-in, boarding the plane, landing and finally leaving the airport with options for transport / accomodation – simply just like anybody else.

After brainstorming we came up with an idea of a booklet provided for wheelchair users after booking the flight, describing the whole process step by step in comprehensive form, with plans of the airport (disabled toilets, lifts etc) and all the important telephone numbers etc.

For our presentation we prepared a magazine ad lazout and TV spot storyboard, followed by all important data we found through our research.

The whole exercise was great fun, especiallz that research and brainstorming ideas bit! Looking forward to some future ones!