In part one of this mini blog series ‘How To: Brand Yourself (as a Photographer)’, we spoke about how important it is to have a solid brand when you want to turn your photography into a business for yourself, and how to figure out what your photographic style was and then the process of picking a typographic style to suit your photography, for your logo.

So I thought it might be an idea to show you how I identified my own photographic style and how I then chose to adapt that into a visual identity (a logo) for my business.

HOW I DEVELOPED MY LOGO FOR MY PHOTOGRAPHY?

After my year living in the UK, I felt that I had a better idea of what my photographic style was. I had decided that I really wanted to sell my images as prints. I had spent a year pretty much, taking photographs, building a body of work and had honed my skills quite a lot.

I went through all of my final images (edited images) that I had created and took time analysing what style was mine. After a couple of days, I found that I was more of a traditional photographer and that helped me with the style. But I was tossing and turning about whether to change my Instagram handle and my blog name. I was, at the time, using the moniker of ‘Floresca Times’.

But I really felt that I wasn’t selling my story, my vision, and I thought that it was time to ‘create’ under my own name. That under my own name would allow some scope still for exploration, and possibly freelance work as well. Something that would be relevant with expanding into different facets of a photography career.

So I had established that my photography had a ‘traditional’ style. As a graphic designer before I turned to photography, I always had a very clean and modern aesthetic, but I knew that I would need to put my inner modern designer aside to embrace an approach that reflected my photographic style.

Above: A snapshot of my logo trial process. The one in the bottom right became my 

I couldn’t completely switch off my inner modernist designer instincts and still wanted to convey a clean and crisp approach with my logo, so the spacing between the letters (known as kerning) became a way that I could still inject some modernity into my ‘traditional’ logo.

When I created this logo, I was still unsure that I should just hang my career hat on photography (I guess everyone wants to hedge their bets a little when starting out!). But as time has gone on, it’s been a year since I’ve designed the logo and my business cards, I kind of wish that I had just written ‘photographer’ and ‘photography’.

The reason why I want to change my business card now is that I feel like that image doesn’t reflect my photography any more. That my photography has developed since I took that shot and did that design.

That said, the actual typographic identity is still relevant, and I think it still suits my kind of photography, so of course, I’m going to keep that!

I guess, in a way, it’s hard to think about where you think your photography might be in a year or two when you are starting to take it seriously as a career. But I really do think that if you go back through your photography (your portfolio of images), the essence of your photographic style will become apparent and then the process to brand your photography business will become a lot easier.

PS. If you want to go through the self-branding process feel free to print off the FREE cheat sheet below! xx

mcgco_photographicbrand_cheatsheet