Our Personal Brand; It's Electric!
Who are we? What do we represent? How do we want the world to view us? All of those existential questions you ask yourself as you approach adulthood are basic branding basics. Crafting your personal brand is like going through puberty and you have to figure out who you want to be. You then proceed to answer all the questions that started this paragraph, and bam, you have your personal brand. Your mission statement, your uvra, your marketing face that you will show to the world. Trust me when I say that journey isn’t an easy one. Discovering what your brand is and trying to capture that in a pretty image, is a long arduous journey that leads to some Star Trek level exposition. And like the third act of a good episode, you eventually have what you’ve been searching for. A logo for the world to see, and a personal brand ready to take on the world.
The original, and overtly cliche logo! Not so electric!
Our journey began one long year ago, with a compass rose. Yes, that compass rose. Arguably the most cliche thing that comes to mind when you say sailing for navigation. The only thing that might come before it is the thought of a boat. Then the compass rose. We thought ourselves clever. We jumped for metaphorical joy when it was complete. Then we proceeded to just brand everything with that rainbow colored compass rose. Except, it was a little busy, and a bit much. It wasn’t us even remotely. It was a thing of the past and not nearly as sleek as we wanted it to be. But, we had already started the season, and made merch, and a blog, and everything else in between. We didn’t just want to create a new logo in the middle of the season because we didn’t have time, and didn’t know what we wanted. There was no cohesion between our website, social media, youtube channel, nothing. It was just a random assortment of art that all fit into the same cinematic universe, but didn’t necessarily look good together. This was our problem, our inciting incident, our Incredible Hulk film. It served the purpose but wasn’t quite good enough. So when Ixion landed on the rocks we decided to turn that tragedy into opportunity, like the first Iron Man film, and make some freaking magic. Magic that actually made sense to who we were and how we wanted to present ourselves.
Over the next few freezing cold months, we looked deep inside ourselves and tried to figure out what we wanted all of this to look like. What was our channel really about? What were we about? What was it we really wanted to show? What was our personal brand? There’s that phrase again, personal brand. It’s just a broad phrase, yet it seemed to be everywhere, especially in the creator economy. every creator, or influencer, seemed to have their own personal brand. Whether they were a filmmaker centered around comedy, or a fashion influencer, or a makeup guru. Every single one of them has a cohesive story they are telling through all their mediums. We were just existing in the world of sailing, and that’s all we knew. But we were so much more than just the sailing, we are complex, strong, gay indiviuals. Literally so many things outside the world of sailing, yet we branded ourselves in such an overly specific way. We are filmmakers, sailors, artists, adventurers, trendsetters, fashionable, etc. Yet none of that came through, just sailing. So, we realized we needed to craft a brand that was more akin to who we are. A brand that is creative, and electric, and nerdy. Yet sexy, exciting, and bold! Something that transcended the world of sailing and boats. A personal brand that encompassed us at large. It was then we realized we were marketing geniuses! We knew what to do! Marketing geniuses I tell you! Now, thirteen logos later, here we are.
It’s Electric! It’s beautiful, it’s a model, it looks just Linda Evangelista!
To travel down the highway that is our cloud, you would see more than a dozen variations of our new logo. Each one more creative and exciting than the previous one. Some were complex and eccentric, some just downright simple. But they never quite felt right. They either leaned too much to one side, or just didn’t mirror us. One looked to the night sky, and mirrored an astrolabe displaying the Pleiades constellation. While extremely cool, it was a bit complex and still lacked our style sensibilities. If you know us, we are all about modern, sleek, contemporary, and minimalistic. That transcends all mediums. From boat design, to architecture, to fashion, to graphic design. We are all about that modern, and minimalistic look. That’s our jam, yet we weren’t listening to it. So with that in mind, we began again. This time incorporating that with our love for fantasy video games and movies, with our love for mythology, and modern design. We combined all of that with our sailing name and wamo bamo, you have our new logo! Each variation is just as exciting as the others. For the first time, we had a logo that truly represented us! And it looks damn good on a hat.
Now that our logo, and our color palette were complete, we had a face to show the world. Without that, how could we have moved forward with our personal brand? We couldn’t. We needed to know how we looked and branded our material before we could even think about our voice. But with this beautiful new logo and style guide, we could launch from there to showcase who we were to the world. We already knew what kind of stories we wanted to tell, and how we wanted to present it, we just didn’t have the face to match that story. We didn’t have a cohesive style guide that covered all of our mediums, but now we do! At the end of the day, our personal brand is just the personification of our personalities, and all the fun that comes with that. Now we can present ourselves to the world in a way we can be proud of. A logo and color guide isn’t a catch all for our personal brand, but now the marketing material could mirror the rest of our brand. Though the word sailing exists in our name it’s not all that we are. We are so much more than that, and now our logo represents that. It represents the niche that is Jake and Nick and Sailing Ixion. A tenacious group who overcome all obstacles, and never give up. We are our own personal Avengers. We are our own heroes. And That’s who we are; a travel, diy, lifestyle entertainment brand that captures the insanity of our lives, and presents it to all of you. That’s our personal brand, and it’s electric!
- Jake
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