Written by Scott

It may not be something we think about every day, but branding has become more and more recognizable in today’s digital world.

An artist might even think they don’t have a specific brand. However, everyone has a brand, whether or not they realize it. It may be consistent, it may be inconsistent. It may be professional. It may be amateur. It may be something you’d see at a tradeshow or convention center, or it may be just a business card or website design.

Brand Creation

The goal is not to create a false brand created by a marketing firm. The goal is to let your natural brand develop, grow, and evolve into something that is your visual and emotional representation.

It is something to be fostered, not invented.

However, once you begin to see your brand take shape, you should cultivate it and strive to make all of your public communication strengthen that brand. This brand is what you are to people. This is how you will be remembered.

Recently, I produced a video for Angie and also updated some Internet marketing banners for her as well. I took great care to make sure that both the video and the graphic ads were consistent with each other.

As an example, here’s the video for Angie’s Live Digital Caricatures that I created:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

And to the left is the banner I created for Angie’s PartyPop page (a popular artist directory).

This design used many of the same elements (like the blue background and the spiral flourishes) to create a consistent image. They also happen to have the same color pallet as her blog.

She has a very clean style with crisp, solid, lines, when she draws. In addition to performing the Live Digital Caricatures at Trade Shows, she also performs for many classy private engagements and so we wanted to capture all of this in the video.

Is There a Wrong Brand
In a word, yes. In fact, every brand is wrong except for the one that fits you. This goes back to what we were discussing earlier. You’ve got to let the brand find you.

Some people or even companies have a very appealing brand. It might be tempting to ‘mimic’ this style. However, this won’t be you. It will ring false and not have the meaning that is behind something that is grown and created from inside you.

Is Branding Just Pretty Pictures?
At first, when we think branding, we think of pretty logos, color pallets, and catch phrases. However there is more to it than that.

Branding includes names. And a big part of this include websites, blogs, and other forms of social media.

One of the first things we did years ago was to move away from our blog on Blogger. Blogger is Google’s blog server that hosts a ton of blogs for free. Its great for getting started blogging.

However, everytime you tell someone your blog address, its something at blogspot.com. The better solution is to have your own website and add a subdomain to that site.

This way, your blog is branded with your own name. For example, Angie’s blog is blog.AngieJordan.com, my video production blog is blog.ReelsinMotion.com, and so on.

The added benefit to this is that you not only gain the branding advantage, but you also benefit from all the inbound links to your own server.

I’ve written other articles about how to set this up (we use WordPress, for example, to setup our blogs on our own servers).

In Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to use branding to market yourself as an artist. A great start to analyzing your current brand is to have friends and colleagues give you honest feedback about everything that you have that is public, from business cards, to websites, to blogs, to promotional videos.

Good luck!

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