Read on: misfit-way.comโ
Read time: 10 minutes
Follow: #personalrebrand
The “advanced” design guide for a LinkedIn visual brand identity
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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:
- Cover banner
- 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 ๐ง , Luke Matthews, Nausheen I. Chen ๐ฅ, 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.
- A way to capture/generate leads and give value upfront.
- A way to show my work (let your work speak for itself first).
- 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
- New design for the ConvertKit newsletter template (Subscribe to my newsletter https://misfit-way.com/ to see it)
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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 ๐ฌ)
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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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