Self-Promotion

Self-promotion is 'the action of promoting or publicising oneself or ones activities, especially in a forceful way.'

Many creatives, especially freelancers have to maintain a high level of self-promotion in order to gain clients and allow themselves to become well known in the industry.

Task: Produce a promotional poster with a portrait.

I started my research by tapping 'self promotion' and 'self-promotional poster' into pinterest and gaining some interesting results.

Above are many of what would be considered to be unique and interesting ways to draw customer attention and interest.

A number of other key methods of business (freelancer) and client communication and overall success include:

• Being confident in the business manifesto, i.e. the illustrators qualities and services
• Knowing own strengths and accomplishments 
• Having a USP (unique selling point), although this may be difficult as a freelancer as many illustrators have similar intentions and ambitions
• Developing good client relationships and contacts
• Be motivated, be passionate about work and do it well
• Be patient and determined but also push boundaries
• Use of persuasive and demanding language

http://www.coachingforchange.com/pub06.html

All of the above points must be shown in the method of promotion; in this instance a poster. The idea is for a client to choose YOU over any other illustrator.

Some promotional posters:

My Ideas

I devised a quick character that represented me in a simplified way incorporating my height, the way I usually wear my hair and my favourite pair of shoes that I wear most days.

The finished poster

Admittedly I did rush this whole process; I definitely should have invested more time into the planning and crafting of the poster. I could have incorporated more humour into the language, emphasised particular features e.g. my height (taking the piss of how short I am) and also invested more time into the presentation of type.

Task

As a group we had to award first second and third place to the best posters, and state why. I received two third places for the concept, being 'cute' and simple and straight to the point.

In the group there were posters that were extremely humorous, informative and all round effective in terms of communication with the viewer. It is important to realise that we need to imagine that the audience for these posters aren't just our classmates; we need to imagine that these would actually determine whether or not a client would choose to employ us based on the information and presentation given in the poster.