Podcast: Building a Visual Brand with Lottie Caiella
“Brand” is a word that we all kind of bristle at, so when we use the word brand, we’re really referring to the rubric through which you pass your work when you are pursuing creativity with intention and with an audience in mind. All of us, in one way or another, are drawn to beauty in our real life and online spaces, but many of us struggle to curate a consistent look for our own work.
So we’re chatting with Lottie Caiella, the art director for C+C and a freelance designer, about how to build a visual brand for yourself. For anyone who might not know Lottie and her work, she and her husband, John Louis, live in upstate New York with their 1.5 year old daughter, Louisa, and Lottie is expecting their second girl in April. If you don’t already, you will likely adore following Lottie’s adventures in design, mothering, coffee-making, and dessert-baking over on Instagram where she seems to effortlessly pull together the most stunning feed possible. You can find her design work at porridgeandpine.com or the Porridge & Pine Instagram, and she’s fun to follow on Pinterest as well.
Resources we shared with you:
We talked about finding your message with Ashley Abramson in Episode 16, and we touched on how Ashlee Gadd manages to stay true to the C+C brand in Episode 21.
Sonya mentioned a video that Lottie and her husband created to announce their daughter’s arrival. You can see that sweet video here.
Lottie mentioned Upwork, Behance, and Dribbble as places to find a designer to work with or to start sharing your own work.
She also mentioned that you can affordably purchase fonts and packages of logo on Creative Market, and you can try your hand at basic design on your own using Canva, an online graphic design software.
Lottie mentioned Kate Baer as a writer who has established her own brand on Instagram. Heads up: we’re chatting with Kate for the Exhale Podcast in April!
Think you want to hire Lottie to do some design work for your visual brand? She’s got an Exhale Marketplace listing for that!
A creative prompt for you:
As a companion to this interview, Lottie has created a downloadable worksheet that will walk you through a pre-branding exercise to help you figure out what your own visual brand is. We’d encourage you all to grab a copy and work through it -- even if you already have an established brand for yourself, it never hurts to clarify that as you keep creating.
If you need to dive even deeper than that, Lottie’s also got a listing in our creative marketplace for a mini branding package that will help you create a logo, choose a font, and settle on a color palette for your own visual brand.
A submission opportunity for you:
Behance and Dribbble are two amazing sites where designers can post their work to get feedback from other designers and also get work! Instagram is now becoming that sort of thing, too.
A quote Lottie shared with you:
“The whole first chapter of East of Eden by John Steinbeck has visual imagery that is stunning. This quote particularly stays with me and I try to channel it in speaking about brands to clients: ‘and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.’ And that’s what I want my art to feel like.” --- Lottie
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