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06/06/07 Your face is your brand
LONDON, UK - As social online networking for web entrepreneurs becomes more prevalent through sites like facebook, mybloglog, linkedin, flickr etc. we’re creating online profiles of ourselves all over the place.
The human brain is incredible at recognising faces. You will be able to point out a face you’ve seen before at any point in your life from a gallery of thousands. You’ll even be able to ‘age’ the face enough to still recognise the person years later. Try that out with a username or url — It’s hard to remember the address of a good site you visited only last week. Often if I don’t recognise the URL, I ask people at events to describe their blog template/colours to me.
If you want to ‘become known’ — you need to build a brand image around yourself to be instantly recognisable, and the most recognisable thing is your own face. A thumbnail of your face transcends you into the offline world better than any other method you can utilise.
Online, your brand is your face.
To build your brand, your little 48×48 pixels of thumbnail is all you have. I’ve been using a small cartoon face until recently, it’s worked a treat, when I hand out my moocard most people say “ahh so that’s you”. Time for the next step - I want that reaction when they meet me - not when it comes to handing over cards, so I’ve moved to a photo.
What makes a good thumbnail? What can you do to get maximum offline impact?
- You need to zoom in, amplify your features.
- For once I can say I’m lucky to have glasses — distinctive ones too. It’s a shape people can recognise.
- For widgets, try to look over your right shoulder so you face the content of the page. Most widgets appear on right sidebars. If you look towards off-screen, you’ll miss the rapport.
- Use a sharp image, no blurryness — just like your collars should be!
- Brighten it up! Don’t be in shadow, or funny lighting colours.
I’m going to do a quick run-down of some good, bad & ugly Irish MyBlogLog icons and see if we can improve our brand!
UPDATE 9th June 2007: I’ve saved a local copy of all the thumbnails so you can see the transition over time from then and now.
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Good stuff. Identifiable. Could be closer.
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Uh oh. You should try a tool called Pixenate to fix that!
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Similar to my old character - but how do you take it offline?
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Looking off-screen.
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Zoom in, and great!
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Perfect. Close. Distinguishable features. Facing left.
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Needs LouderColours and a little stretched.
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Good example. But flip it horizontal.
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Good example. But straighten up.
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Good angle. Zoom in. Brighten Colours!
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Perfect and matches site brand. This guy a designer?
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Flip horizontal. But good composition.
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Sharpen up. Zoom in. Flip horizontal.
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Zoom in to face.
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Good.
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Perfect. You’d think he was in marketing.
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Completely needs a rethink!
Tags: branding
13 Comments
Great post - I like how the MyBlogLog Reader Roll lets you critique the faces next to your examples. I instantly recognized the fergusburns picture (i know him and he doesn’t look anything like that!) and I also guess I need to redo my photo!
Hehe, I just dumped my old ’salami sandwich with cherry tomato’ thumbnail yesterday, across a few of my social software services and finally replaced it with a facial shot. After reading the above tips I realize I need to improve it but I did it for the exact reasons you point out - no-one was going to recognize me from the salami sandwich icon (although there was a slight resemblance ;-)
“Perfect and matches site brand. This guy a designer or something?” - That’s Eoghan McCabe but I think you know that anyways.
Good post and a great tip about looking over your right shoulder.
I must get on mybloglog. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages.
yeh Cormac - I know everyone I featured ;-)
thanks for the nice comment. May do a series of some more ‘tip’ posts.
08/06/07 I’m on MyBlogLog, what to do?
[...] post on ‘Your Face is your Brand‘ is after forcing my hand a bit into actually doing something my with MyBlogLog profile. I [...]
You are so right about the 48 squared perspective. My personal avatar was a mask until last month when people who planned to meet me at an airport with free transport encountered more hassle than they deserved so it’s into the headshot to modify the washed-out look that happened when I compressed the file too hard.
10/06/07 ByteSurgery [ Robin Blandford ] » Evolution of the Avatar - Digital Media Engineering
[...] 2005 « Your face is your brand Evolution of the [...]
Oops. I look a little pink in that shot.
Very, very interesting way to look at it. I guess you can then apply conventional brand rules to the use of your photo like maintaining consistency and distinguishing it in some way.
I’ve had my photo on my site for a long time and have got my fair share of slagging for it. But there’s no better way to show there’s a real, trustworthy person on the other side of the page than by opening-up in this way.
Yes - it’s true though. I’ve begun updating my avatars to the same image across the board.
Currently reading a book on photography. I”m thinking of running an experiment and applying it to Avatars. Maybe give users a grid of 16 random avatars and ask them to click one based on some questions. See what we come up with.
14/06/07 Paul Browne
Good tips.
Any reason that you suggest that most people should look to the left in their photos?
Paul
Hi Paul - Your face should face into the centre of the page. On many blogs (except mine!, and yours I think too!) mybloglog is in the right sidebar. So you could modify your avatar for different layouts.
14/06/07 Paul Browne
Robin,
Obvious when you say it. Photo flipped.
Any quick and easy suggestions on how to sharpen the face / blur the background like you did in your profile?
Paul
Background blur was done while taking photo. Maybe use some photoshop esqe blur tool?
The sharpen, just run a sharpening effect on the image too.
Here’s one I prepared earlier :-)
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/9716/paulbmy4.jpg
