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:
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.
As I wanted to make my CV creative but usable and comprehensive at the same time, I opted for an infographics approach, displaying the timeline of last 10 years, showing what I learned, where I worked, what I was interested in and what are my aspirations for the future.
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