Designing 101 - Episode 2: Identity

Designing 101. What is a (Brand) identity and how can design affect the way you look at that identity. Why is it important to have your own identity on Steemit?

What is an Identity?

A person’s identity is how that person wants to be perceived by it’s readers. The elements of the brand (e.g. Name, Logo, Tagline, Image and Tone) are created by the person to reflect his or her values that he is bringing to Steemit which the readers like. A brand identity is taken separate from the brand image (as mentioned in Episode 1), since the brand image is how how the readers perceive the brand.

So what’s the core of Brand Identity?

Well in your daily life you can have miscommunication with multiple people. The difference between intent (the thing you say) and the perception (how your readers understand it) can be on a whole different level. You think you said one thing, but someone else might understand something else. This problem often occurs.

A brand identity is what it says about you, what kind of (quality) content you deliver, how it helps the reader and the advantages over other Steemians that write about the same thing. When you build your brand you’re trying to make sure it matches your identity as close as possible. A gap between both means that you aren’t sorted out perfectly which can make your branding here more difficult.

So how to build your Brand Identity

So in order to build your identity you have to take a few points into consideration. If you follow these points you will build a strong and consistent brand identity.

• Analyse yourself and Steemit. If you wanna do it correctly you make a SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunity & Treats) analysis and define what your strong points are and weaknesses. Then you start checking out Steemit where you can find opportunity’s on topics that aren’t written much but are highly needed. Lastly you check the treats, this can be the competition or topics that are already written much in.
• Identify your readers! Check what kind of people like your content, experiment a bit. Then interact with them and grow your follower base on that topic.
• Determine your goals. What do you wanna achieve on Steemit? Set milestones that you can celebrate with yourself and your followers. Share those and stay excited!
• Determine your tone of voice How do you wanna write? What does your follower base like? Are you gonna be formal or informal? Gonna write long posts or to the point?

So how can design help with your identity?

Well when you write everything down your essentially making a persona out of yourself which is design by itself. Only not in the form that design normally is. It’s on a more strategic level. But I mentioned a logo or image already which can benefit you greatly and thus I wanna give an example of Brand Identity.

Every brand has its own font and some things you recognise immediately through design. Well the designers of Antrepo have created a conceptual packaging design from the best brands all over the world and I would like to highlight the brand Nutella . Everyone knows this one. With the example of Antrepo you can see that the minimalist approach is working and that all the things around the logo aren’t needed to still recognise the brand itself.

Source: dezeen

When you have a good identity in combination with your brand, it doesn’t matter if your design is good. People will still buy your product and still recognise you. The same is on Steemit. If you keep true to yourself and your identity, people will recognise the style you write in and what you write about. This they will up vote your posts as well.

I hope this was informative and you learned a bit more about design and identity! Do you have something you want to know about? Let me know in the comments and I can prepare an episode about that as well!