Designing Your Brand

Leading Thoughts #79

Question of the Week:

What's one choice you can make to eliminate ten in the future?

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Leading Thought:

One answer to that question is learning design.

This weekend, I took Nate Kadlac's two-day Approachable Design Workshop. The course is a gateway for non-designers into design and, knowing Nate, it'd been on my list for a while.

It was one of those rare courses you walk away knowing you got more than your money’s worth. I learned design and got a mini-therapy session, all at the same time.

We started by looking inward. We were interviewed by a peer who recorded keywords to identify distinguishing themes. Those transformed into visual boards:

Starting from a place of abundance, we used our boards to create our own unique color palettes. The images later served as an inspiration to pull out shapes for logos, headers, and even bullets.

We even named our colors!

Although requiring refining afterward, the end result is a complete design palette (including fonts) that you can instantly apply for uniform branding across your site, newsletter, Twitter, Linkedin, and anything else.

I’m still experimenting, but do any of these logos stand out to you?

It was my eight most productive and creative hours of 2022. It was impossible not to leave the course feeling good about yourself and what you accomplished.

There’s more work ahead for me, but I look forward to featuring a coherent brand.

As I write up a more in-depth review, is there anything you'd like to know about the course? Or about design? I'm virtually an expert now. =)

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Thoughts Worth Exploring:

• How to be the best in the world: make a unique stack of skills.

  

• Liva Jan shows us what’s required to achieve focus in our lives:

  

• I’m trying to expand my social media presence. I’ve tweeted several days in a row on Twitter, but Dickie Bush demonstrates the untapped potential of Linkedin.

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Stay Curious,

Scott