Build Your Own Brand: Strategies, Prompts and Exercises for Marketing Yourself

by Robin Landa

What is your brand?

As a designer your success depends on how you brand yourself and the service you provide. This book will help you explore, develop, distill, and determine a distinctive brand essence, differentiate yourself, and create your visual identity.

Build Your Own Brand is a guided journal designed to help you sketch, write, design, and conceive the way you brand yourself. More than 80 prompts and exercises will help you develop

Whether you're trying to land a new job or launch a design business, let this unique guide light the way. You'll find helpful advice, interviews, and prompts from esteemed psychologists, creative directors, brand strategists, designers, artists, and experts from a variety of disciplines. Build your own brand today!

Genres: Business, Design

240 pages, Spiral-bound

First published August 6, 2013

About the author

Robin Landa holds the title of Distinguished Professor in the Robert Busch School of Design at Kean University of New Jersey. She is included among the teachers that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching calls the “great teachers of our time.” Most recently, Landa was a finalist in the Wall Street Journal’s Creative Leaders competition.
Professor Landa has won many awards for design, writing, teaching, and creative leadership, including: National Society of Arts and Letters, The National League of Pen Women, New Jersey Authors Award, Creativity, Graphic Design USA, Art Directors Club of New Jersey, The Presidential Excellence Award in Scholarship from Kean University, and the Rowan University Award for Contribution to Design Education.
Landa is the author of twelve published books about graphic design, branding, advertising, and creativity including Graphic Design Solutions, 4th edition (Wadsworth), Advertising by Design, 2nd edition (John Wiley & Sons), Designing Brand Experiences (Cengage Learning), and Thinking Creatively (HOW books). Her books have been translated into Chinese and Spanish.
Co-authoring with her colleague Professor Rose Gonnella, she wrote Visual Workout Creativity Workbook (Cengage Learning); and co-authored 2D: Visual Basics for Designers with Gonnella and award-winning designer Steven Brower. Known for her expertise in creativity, Landa penned Thinking Creatively (HOW), and co-authored Creative Jolt and Creative Jolt Inspirations (North Light Books) with Rose Gonnella and Denise M. Anderson. Robin’s article on ethics in design, “No Exit for Designers,” was featured in Print magazine’s European Design Annual/Cold Eye column; other articles have been featured in HOW magazine, Step Inside Design, Critique, and Icograda. Robin’s Amazon Shorts—“Advertising: 11 Insights from Creative Directors” and “Branding: 10 Truths Behind Successful Brands”—both reached the #1 spot on the Shorts best-seller list.
Robin has lectured across the country at the HOW International Design Conferences, Graphic Artists Guild conference, College Art Association, Thinking Creatively conference, Art Directors Club of New Jersey, and the One Club Education Summit. She has been interviewed on radio, television, in print, and the World Wide Web on the subjects of design, creativity, and art.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book that provides a lot of value.  However, it does come with some negatives.  First, let's talk about the good stuff.  Overall, you'll be provided with a lot of questions to help you come with your own brand.  These questions range from the generic to the insightful.  After reading the entire book, you'll have all the questions that you need to be holistic and deep in creating Brand U. 
 
However, the problem is that you will need to put the pieces together as the book jumps around a lot.  There are several places throughout the book that talks about resumes and how it is your advertisement tool.  This is done over and over again with other subjects in building your brand.  It would have been better if the author could have logically grouped these subjects in their own separate chapters.  Then, link the subjects to a bigger picture.  I found myself highlighting many parts of the book, taking some notes and organizing everything in a more logical manner. 
 
Even though the title doesn't suggest it, the book seems to heavily target graphic designers and how they can make their own brand.  This might be a turn-off for those who are not graphic designers but still want the deep dive into their own profession and how they can brand themselves to stick out. 
 
Build Your Own Brand is a book that will make you work to really get something out of it.  But for those that is willing to do it, the value is there.

[Masha Mazi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess it would be great for a beginner but it's pretty basic. Another book of "determining your why, personality & audience is the key" with some case studies & interviews that feel like going to Cannes Lions - the people included not giving any real practical advice, just intangible motivational pep talks and a few screenshots.