Kat Koh’s guide to personal branding
Fanette Guilloud. The Internet project. Death to Stock.
Written August 2026 and will be updated. This guide was written thanks to research and structural queries to Perplexity.ai.
Creatives don’t struggle because they lack talent.
They struggle because their ideal clients, collaborators, and audiences don’t quickly understand what they do, who it is for, or why they are the right choice.
Treat your creative career like a distinct category rather than a collection of services. The following strategies go beyond “post consistently” and focus on building a personal brand, an undeniable niche, and positioning people can repeat to others.
1. Promise a specific transformation.
Decrease the time it takes for someone to understand your work. Your homepage, portfolio bio, social-profile headline, or pitch deck should answer three questions within seconds: what you make, who you help, and what outcome or feeling you create.
Avoid leading with broad labels such as “multidisciplinary creative”. Instead of “Designer and creative thinker,” try: “Brand strategist for biotech businesses that want their story to sing.”
Use this formula:
I help [specific audience] achieve [specific transformation] through your creative discipline or approach.
2. Build your niche around that specific transformation.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, but I’ll say it now: we’re post-niche (as we knew it). Before, a niche is how you get found and remembered and it still is.
Clients usually hire the person they can easily place in a relevant mental category, the person who seems most experienced and can clearly communicate their experience. This is the client’s thought process especially when the work feels high-stakes.
Skew more toward psychographics than demographics. Choose a blend of:
• An audience or industry: founders, fashion labels, restaurants, musicians, climate companies, cultural institutions.
• Their problem or ambition: launching, differentiating, growing community, earning trust, becoming premium, capturing the attention of Gen Z.
• Your skills: illustration, filmmaking, strategy, photography, copywriting, design, styling, music, etc.
• A point of view: editorial, playful, minimalist, research-led, hyper-local, experimental, cinematic.
For example, “photographer” is the word for someone who makes a living making photographs. “Photographer for climate startups that want an emotional yet data-driven identity” is getting closer to a position.
3. Cultivate your authentic POV.
Your work is easier to choose when it is associated with a recognizable belief. This is not a slogan—it is the principle that guides your creative decisions.
A strategist might believe that “the strongest brands sound like people, not pitch decks.”
A filmmaker might stand for “documentary texture over polished advertising.”
A designer might be known for “building identities that make small organizations look culturally consequential.”
Write down:
• What do most people in your field get wrong?
• What do you consistently prioritize?
• What should clients stop doing?
• What result do you want your work to be known for?
Then repeat the answer across your portfolio, case studies, content, talks, and conversations. Consistent language helps people form a stable understanding of your brand.
4. Turn your portfolio into proof.
A portfolio should not merely display finished work. It should make the case that you can solve a specific kind of problem for a specific kind of client.
For each featured project, include:
• The context: who the client was and what was at stake.
• The challenge: the audience, business, or creative problem.
• Your role: what you personally led or delivered.
• Your thinking: the key insight or approach.
• The result: business impact, audience response, launch outcome, press, growth, or client feedback.
If you cannot show your recent work due to NDA restrictions at your company, or you want to pivot into a different kind of design and don’t have projects to show yet, create spec projects that illustrate and become a magnet for the assignments you want. A strong concept for a dream client can be more persuasive than a generic paid project.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to show your thinking. It will set you apart quickly.
80-90% of portfolios lack inspiring articulation of design choices, framing, client psychology, strategic decision-making.
5. Dress for the job you want. Not all the jobs you can do.
Trying to market every capability equally makes you difficult to refer. People can only remember so much. You can absolutely have multiple skills, but lead with the one role you want people to remember and hire first.
Like “Jen sculpts fair-trade chocolate into a wedding experience”.
For example:
• Primary identity: “Creative director for purpose-led consumer brands.”
• Supporting capabilities: brand strategy, copy direction, campaign concepts, photography commissioning.
This gives you room to be versatile without making your offer vague. A clear primary identity also makes your website navigation, LinkedIn headline, Instagram bio, and outreach more coherent.
6. Name your approach.
A named process turns invisible creative judgment into something clients can understand and buy. It also distinguishes you from other people with a similar craft.
Your method does not need to be complicated. It can be three to five memorable stages, such as:
1. Find the cultural tension.
2. Define the brand’s sharpest point of view.
3. Build the visual and verbal system.
4. Make it usable in the real world.
Give the method a name that reflects how you actually work—such as “The Local Icon Method,” “Story-First Identity,” or “The Editorial Brand System.” A defined framework can become a recurring asset across proposals, content, workshops, and case studies.
7. Publish in response to client pain points.
Do not post only finished work. Publish for the specific moments when a potential client realizes they need someone like you.
For a brand designer, those moments might be:
• “We have a great product, but our brand looks generic.”
• “We are launching and need to look credible fast.”
• “Our company has grown, but our identity no longer fits.”
• “We need a campaign that people actually want to share.”
Create content that answers those situations directly: short videos, carousels, essays, teardown posts, project breakdowns, or opinionated checklists. This mirrors the idea of organizing content around category entry points—the real situations that bring people into a market.
8. Make your online presence coherent.
Someone who finds you on LinkedIn, Instagram, a portfolio site, a podcast, or a conference page should encounter the same core story.
Inconsistent bios and descriptions make it harder for people—and search engines — to understand what you are known for.
Standardize these elements:
• Your name and professional title.
• Your one-sentence positioning statement.
• Your visual identity and headshot.
• Your location, if it matters to the work you seek.
• Your current offer or call to action.
• Links to your portfolio, newsletter, booking page, or inquiry form.
This does not mean every channel must look identical. It means every channel should reinforce the same underlying reputation.
9. Develop a recognizable body of work.
Personal brand is not just self-promotion. It is the pattern people see across your projects, ideas, voice, and relationships.
Look for recurring elements in your strongest work:
• Subject matter or industries.
• Color, composition, tone, or production style.
• The emotional response you create.
• The types of stories you tell.
• The clients and communities you champion.
• The outcomes you consistently deliver.
Then deliberately make more work that strengthens those associations.
Recognition compounds when people can spot your taste and thinking before they see your name.
10. Use social media as distribution, not your archive.
Your social feed should direct attention toward your best thinking and your highest-value work. It does not need to contain every sketch, project, or trend.
Build a simple content mix:
• Proof: case studies, testimonials, before-and-after work, outcomes.
• Perspective: opinions, critiques, creative principles, industry observations.
• Process: work-in-progress, decision-making, tools, behind-the-scenes context.
• Personality: interests, local culture, references, values, and influences.
A useful test: if a prospective client reviewed your last 12 posts, would they understand what to hire you for?
11. Create work that can be cited and shared.
In an increasingly AI-mediated and recommendation-driven web, generic portfolio copy is easy to ignore.
Make useful, specific material that others can reference: original research, practical frameworks, detailed case studies, curated resource lists, or sharp and well-reasoned takes on your field.
For instance, a creative director could publish “Seven visual signals that make a neighborhood restaurant feel like a chain.”
A photographer could publish “How founders can prepare for a one-day brand shoot.” These pieces demonstrate expertise before a client ever reaches out.
Structure them clearly: use direct headlines, answer the question early, and make each section understandable on its own. Clear, self-contained passages are also easier for AI systems to extract and cite.
12. Design your offer around outcomes.
Clients do not buy “a logo,” “a shoot,” or “some content” in isolation. They buy visibility, momentum, clarity, credibility, ATTENTION, cohesion, or a stronger market position.
Make pricing less dependent on hours. This makes your value easier for non-creatives to explain internally.
13. Review and refine your position regularly.
Positioning is not permanent. It should evolve as your taste, skills, reputation, and preferred clients change.
Review your brand every six to twelve months:
• Which projects brought the best creative energy, income, and future opportunities?
• Which clients or industries now seek you out?
• What do people repeatedly praise or ask you about?
• Which services are draining, low-margin, or inconsistent with your desired identity?
• What does your current public presence imply that you do?
Then decide whether to keep, improve, consolidate, or stop promoting certain offers—an approach similar to pruning underperforming content so your strongest signals become clearer.
Position Beyond “Available for Work”
Great creative positioning is not about finding a clever title. It is about creating a clear, credible answer to: Why you, for this audience, for this kind of problem, right now?
Start with the biggest gap:
• If people admire your work but do not inquire, clarify your offer and audience.
• If you get inquiries that are a poor fit, sharpen your niche and boundaries.
• If your work feels scattered, choose a primary identity and develop a signature point of view.
• If you are invisible, publish useful proof around the problems your ideal clients are already trying to solve.
