The “advanced” design guide for a LinkedIn visual brand identity

Read on: misfit-way.comโ€‹
Read time: 10 minutes
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The “advanced” design guide for a LinkedIn visual brand identity

This guide is specifically useful when designing with “personal branding for LinkedIn” in mind.

And no, this is not a logo design tutorial.

In this article/post you’ll learn how to design 2 things:

  1. Cover banner
  2. Featured section

The professional way.

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For context:

You won’t find me talking about design a lot, But when I do, you better expect it to be good.

I don’t do design for visual aesthetics (anymore), I create functional problem-solving visuals.

I just wrapped up the redesign of my personal brand call-to-action visuals.

(I took inspiration from Tony Albrecht, Blair Sharp ๐Ÿง€ , Luke Matthews, Nausheen I. Chen ๐Ÿ”ฅ, Richard Moore LI profiles).

If my banner and featured section covers make you want to click then it’s doing the right job.

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1) First the cover banner

Before I touched a single pixel, I had to come up with a pixel-perfect sentence that tells you what I’m about in 3 seconds or less.

After doing some personal brand research and working on my positioning. (Which you can read more about here: )

I came up with this tagline: “Personal brand copywriter for senior personal brand strategists”

Now to the design, it needs to highlight:

  • My tagline (what I do and who I do it for)
  • My clients/collaborations
  • My visual brand (face, colors, fonts, etc.)
  • The correct size: 1584 width x 396 height
  • Not BEING UNDERNEATH my profile picture (safe zone x white space)

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2) The featured section

I tried to use the rule of thirds.

No not the one with the 3×3 grid.

More like 3 personal branding principles to highlight what I do.

  1. A way to capture/generate leads and give value upfront.
  2. A way to show my work (let your work speak for itself first).
  3. A way to book a call for the main service (when they’re ready, I’m one call away).

As you can see in my featured section, The first 3 visuals do just that.

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Although I wish LinkedIn worked more on their UX and split the featured section into 2 sections:

  • (Free) Resources
  • Services

While still keeping the same UI of their “featured section”.

There isn’t an “exact” size to use with LI-featured covers.

But I found this one to be more convenient: 480 width x 288 height.

Now why am I telling you about something that you can google yourself?

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BECAUSE LinkedIn DID IT AGAIN! with the ugly UX.

I had the perfect sizing and the perfect wording.

But when I pinned it in the featured section for some reason,

The images were not at the same size, they were not equally proportionate.

This drives me mad and I wasted so much time testing and figuring this out so that you don’t have to.

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The solution is so dumb and simple:

LinkedIn featured section has different types of formats (link, media, post, newsletter, etc.).

The first 5 featured elements are the ones the viewer can see and scroll left or right.

The trick is that you have to use the same format for those 5 featured elements to get them to be equally aligned and proportionate (annoying RIGHT!).

As you can see in my featured sections, my first 5 elements are all in a “link” format.

That solved the problem (for now).

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Since you’ve read so far, Let me tell you about…

Another redesign I did

I’ve created a visual distinction between:

The Brand Orchestrate (my personal branding business) and the Misfit Way (my creative misfit community).

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What are the new changes?

(Mainly for the Misfit Way)

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  • New logo with a minimal black style
  • New covers for the newsletter

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P.S. I already had the vision and visual direction for both, thanks to Eman Elhennawy & Imene Ben youssef for their brilliant help!

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Not to mention,

My new wool fiber, British flat, brim felt, fedora podcast hat.

(That sounded exotic but it’s just a cool hat, sorry not sorry David Pierce Tuttle ๐ŸŽฌ)

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If this guide is useful, share it with a friend.

If it isn’t, share it with an enemy.

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Stay tuned for part 5 of the #personalrebrand – Messaging

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Plot twist:

The #personalrebrand series will be turned into an email course that drives, on average, an extra 20% of revenue to my branding business.

So if you are getting value out of this and you like my style of writing,

I can help you produce high-quality content that documents your expertise and takes your personal brand to the next level of authority, credibility, and industry recognition.

Email me “ghostwriting” to know more.

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Till next week,

Your misfit friend.

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Not all heroes wear capes, some wear glasses.
But the
conductor wears both.
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~ See you in traffic ~