After months of work, dozens of projects with our customers, workshops with thousands of students and countless revisions, the new Personal Branding Canvas is finally out: 10 years after the very first edition!
Ten exciting years that took us around the world: from Armenia to Bath in the UK, to teaching in Business Schools such as SDA Bocconi, IE Madrid and St Gallen and running projects with the headquarters of multinationals like Sandoz, Allianz, BSH, Daiichi Sankyo, Luxottica and Swiss Post.
This new version has been comprehensively revised and optimized. Now it uses simpler, more intuitive texts, written in the first person.
We’ve also taken this opportunity presented by this new edition to review all the tools in our Toolkit which we’ve renamed as the Career Innovation Toolkit.
Learn all about the Toolkit in this article…
The reasons for the new design:
Here’s what drove our decision to carry out the “restyling” which is, to all intents and purposes, complete redesign:
- Made in MS Powerpoint: the previous version was created in Adobe Illustrator which led to various editing and conversion issues. The new version was created in MS Powerpoint and is extremely flexible and usable.
- Order of Completion: each block now has a superscript number indicating the order in which the Canvas is to be completed. It’s Impossible to go wrong.
- Digital and remote: during the pandemic, we had to use all our visual thinking tools 100% digitally. We chose to use Mural.com and Google Slides – two extremely flexible platforms. Participants in our consulting and training projects were able to use the Canvas while being remotely monitored and guided in real time. For technical reasons, the previous version was not ideally suited to interactive usage: icons were not really digital-ready, texts were poorly readable, and completion of blocks was hampered by a lack of space . The new edition has been designed from the ground up to be used 100% digitallyIt uses new Google Fonts which are available directly on Google Drive.
- New texts & in the first person: the previous texts were all about YOU. While it may not be immediately obvious, using texts in the first person allows for greater introspection and will help users identify themselves better and avoids the extra You → Me step. We’ve also renamed entire blocks (e.g. “Skills” to “Competence” and “Reasons to Believe” to “Credibility” for consistency with other block names). We have greatly simplified the previous texts to avoid unnecessary categories and formatting that was sometimes a little confusing
- Inconsistent icons: due to a succession of designers and various updates, the various tools had become misaligned graphically. This affected in particular the colors and the icons. Some were not very memorable and others, in some cases , were entirely useless. We only left the icons on the main tools and included a little “character” to increase the sense of relevance for personal usage. By the way: we’ve called the character… “Brandi” 😅
- Future-proof: we’re going to publish more of the other tools we use in our projects. Thanks to this graphic platform, we can now extend the Toolkit by generating a whole series of additional tools to achieve our greater Purpose: to end professional fragility!
A co-design with Matteo Bandi
The activity was co-designed together with Matteo Bandi, a designer London-based in who specializes in user interaction and digital interfaces– especially for mobile apps and startups. Matteo was a revelation. His ability to quickly ground, test and stress tools allowed us to achieve much more than we expected!
Here’s an interview with Matteo in which he talks about the project and the design approach.
You can download the Canvas together with the rest of the Toolkit on the dedicated page. If, on the other hand, you have already downloaded the previous edition and have already authorized us to do so, you should have received an email with all the PDFs. If you haven’t, give us a shout!
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