Brand new Brand YOU
"Personal branding reflected in the zeitgeist. Watching the pros in entertainment, politics, business. And now you. What makes YOU different?"

1. Know thyself.

Designing your personal Web site is only the second step. Before you do anything else, you’ve got to figure out who you are, and then you’ve got to embrace that. Everything else flows from there. People outside the mainstream — gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities — have always had to confront this issue. There’s a point in their lives when they have to say, “This is who I am. If you can’t handle it, move on.” Before you begin designing a Web site, think about what kind of life you want to lead and what kind of career you want to design. The secret to having a compelling Brand Called You is to know thyself. Otherwise, you’re promoting someone else’s brand with your name on it.

2. The personal is the professional.

There used to be a clear boundary between the professional and the personal. But the line between the two is blurring, especially for free agents and entrepreneurs. When you go to design your personal Web site, don’t let your site sink into this false divide. You are what you do. That’s not all that you are, but it’s a very important component — and a very powerful expression — of who you are.

If you want to see how some people have put this principle into practice, just look at such sites as Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) or Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool News (www.aint-it-cool-news.com). The site, the brand, and the person are all bound up together. And that’s precisely the point. Matt Owens’s Volumeone (www.volumeone.com) is another great example. It’s a beautiful Web site — but it’s more than that. As well as being a portfolio, it’s also a kind of online magazine about design. His views, his experiences, and his tastes come through as much as his work does.

This principle has slowly begun to take hold. That’s why having a personal domain to associate with your email address or URL has become the most prestigious domain that you can have — so much so that people are having to register their domains in other countries, since the ones that they want are already taken in the United States. If work is personal, why shouldn’t domains be personal too? Few of us want to hide behind the banner of a big company. More of us want to hang out a shingle. And if you hang out that shingle, you probably want to put your name on it.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to run out right now and register TrudyLopez.com or DigitalDan.com. But you should think about the way you present yourself online. So, for example, if you’re not going to get your own domain, pick a service that’s compatible with who you are. If your brand is identified with raging against the machine, you don’t want “att.net” or “msn.com” as part of your URL. And if you want to keep some aspects of your online life private, as many of us do, you may want to establish double domains: private.nathan.com and public.nathan.com.

The underlying design principle: Be direct. Tell people who you are, and don’t try to separate the “work you” from the “you you.”