Personal Branding 101: You Are Your Own Secret Sauce
Alison Koehler · Creative | Graphic Designer
A 70-minute self-reflection workbook that turns your own values into a logo, not a design-software tutorial in disguise.
A workbook wearing a video's clothing
Alison Koehler's "Personal Branding 101" is less a lecture series than a guided worksheet session with a screen-recorded demo running alongside it. Every lesson follows the same rhythm: a short explanation, a five-to-twenty-minute exercise done in a companion guidebook, then Koehler working through the same exercise using a fictional example business, Waggin' Pet Portraits. That running example, an illustrated pet-portrait studio, is the spine of the course. By the time it reaches the logo stage, the half-circle dog mark and wagging-tail wordmark it produces make an abstract process feel concrete, because you watch one brand get built end to end rather than seeing scattered before-and-afters.
The first half is pure introspection: identifying skills, passions, and goals through a mind-map worksheet, distinguishing "personality" from "persona," writing a brand statement, and building an ideal-client profile named Susan, complete with age, shopping habits, and astrological sign as an optional shortcut. The most useful idea in this stretch is the instruction to skip outside reference sites entirely and instead draw word associations from your own adjectives, a doodled chain from "empathetic" to "sun" to "party hat" to "dog" that becomes raw material for a mood board. It is a genuinely different way to generate a mood board than the usual scrape-and-collage approach, and it lands with more clarity than most personal-branding courses manage.
From feelings to files
The second half turns those answers into a visual system: thumbnail sketches, vectoring in Illustrator, a kerning trick that involves imagining the gap between two letters filled with water, and a checklist of the four logo formats every brand needs, horizontal, vertical, round, and a favicon tested at 50 pixels. It closes with three tiers of messaging, from a 150-character Instagram bio to formal award-blurb copy, all keeping the same underlying voice. This section is competent but thin on technique: the actual vectoring and typeface customization move quickly, and viewers hoping to come away with transferable Illustrator skills will find the pace closer to a demo than a tutorial.
The course's honesty is its best quality. Koehler repeatedly undercuts the exercises' own time estimates, admitting a 20-minute logo-testing task will realistically take much longer, which matches the reality of brand work better than most classes bother to. The tradeoff is that all of this depends on the downloadable guidebook doing real work; without it, the lessons are conceptual scaffolding with limited standalone value.
This is not a design-skills course, and it does not pretend to be one. It works best as a structured, one-afternoon exercise in self-definition for someone who has never sat down and written out their own values, ideal client, and voice before, with a light logo-and-messaging payoff at the end. Anyone who already has that clarity, or wants genuine software instruction, will find the 70 minutes moving slower than the content justifies.
The standout
The self-generated mood board exercise, where you sketch word associations from your own brand adjectives rather than pulling references from Pinterest or Behance, is the one idea worth the price of admission on its own.
What you will learn
- Map your skills, passions, and goals into a prioritized set of personal-brand values using a guided worksheet exercise
- Separate personality from brand persona and distill both into a one-to-two-sentence brand statement
- Build a detailed ideal-client persona (age, archetype, shopping habits, goals) to focus who you're speaking to
- Generate visual inspiration from your own word associations instead of Pinterest or Behance, then compile it into a mood board
- Sketch and vector a simple geometric logo and custom wordmark in Illustrator, then test it as horizontal, vertical, round, and favicon-size icon versions
- Write three tiers of brand messaging, from a short social bio to formal client-facing copy, in a consistent voice
Best for: Freelancers, designers, and solopreneurs who have never systematically defined their own brand and want a guided worksheet process rather than a software tutorial.
Skip it if: Anyone wanting deep Illustrator technique, advanced typography, or a strategy course for branding other people's businesses rather than themselves.