This year I took a new challenge in my design career, I left a leadership design position at a fintech platform and ventured to invest in my personal profile as an independent designer.

One of the challenges that I feared most about that new venture was the one about building and marketing a personal brand and making it the best sales representative of your work.

I have always been uninterested in success on social networks and plunging into the world of impressions, likes, and drive traffic seemed dreadful.

Since I've been trying to be more present in my digital self, I've been struggling to find a concept that represents my personal brand in terms of content strategy. You always gotta start with something, for a designer, the easiest always is to display the visual result of your work process, so I did.

It felt incomplete though, I was still trying to find the thing that clicked with who I am. A confluence I visualized like this:

I got the concept from a recent video from Chris Do, in which he says that in marketing, "being different is better than better". Something that resonated with me, but I needed to make a small adjustment for it to click with what I believe to be worth sharing:

Authentic is better than better

After long reflection and paying attention to what has made me stand out as a design professional in the past, I have concluded that the strategic work that leads the design projects I engage in is and has been the knack for listening and empathizing with other people and capitalizing on that synergy with clear design proposals that bring people together and drive projects forward.

But how can one convey such a complex hue of situations and small decisions that led to a specific shaping of a design project?

Back when I was too shy to deploy design solutions myself, I relied on curating and organizing the work of other creatives and gluing everything together in something that made sense for my clients and stakeholders who worked along with me. The more successful way I found to do this was to track every decision made throughout each project with documents or journals that logged every decision that shaped project outcomes.

This journal concept was a solid base on top of which I built a lot of success, so it makes sense now to make it part of my online brand.

I decided to open up my notebook and shape my thoughts publicly as a creative exercise, tapping into my reflections and experiences tracking decision-making in creative projects and visualizing how these decisions are influenced by our value systems shaping the projects we work in, and thus the world around us...

I'll be posting musings about old and present projects the decisions we took and how they shaped the creative projects I had the pleasure to engage with.

Whoever you are, thank you for reading!

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I'm happy to connect through Twitter or shoot me an email at hello@memoesparza.com