Abstract:

The current globalization of markets and the blooming of internet-based communication tools have resulted in many of the professional relations in the different fields of design to be carried out virtually. This way it is possible to expand the customers’ portfolio from a local range to a national or, even, international one, thus enhancing the possibilities of being hired for the development of new professional projects, in the case of both consolidated design studies and novel designers.

However, in order to guarantee the presence of a designer, either freelance or belonging to a design study, in the virtual field, it is necessary to have updated profiles in both general and specialized diverse Social Media.

Therefore, it is necessary for students in the Degree of Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering to have their own Personal Brands, in order to favour their positioning in diverse Social Media platforms as freelance designers. This way, an enhancement of real self-employment expectations for recent graduates, in a complex paradigm as it is the present one, is expected; as this activity would help them developing their activity either individually or creating small design studios between some newly graduated students.

In order to build their Personal Brand, every student has produced graphic evidences to help them show their abilities and values as designers, from conceptual design proposals, at the early years of the Degree, to detailed product industrial designs, in the latter ones.

The production of this graphic material has been related to the participation in two Workshops, addressed to students, given by well-renowned professionals in the fields of Design and Social Media. In these meetings, Personal Branding has been introduced as a key tool for positioning the design studio of the freelance designer in Social Media platforms. Therefore, designers (specially the freelance ones) have to add to their skills the ability for acting as Community Managers of their own identity in the Internet.

Besides, the Workshops have allowed the presentation to students of different design tools which may help them developing their graphic evidences, as well as the singularities of the mostly used Social Media by design professionals. Furthermore, these activities have promoted discussions on the use of diverse graphic languages in the Internet.

The development of the students’ evidences has been carried out by applying a B-Learning methodology, trying to favour students’ autonomy. In a similar way, a Flipped Classroom based methodology has been applied to leave guidelines’ definition out of classroom time while letting classroom sessions to be used for discussing on the communicative abilities of their graphic proposals, as well as on their graphical and technical quality.

As a result, every student has built his own Personal Brand, with the aim of having presence in different Social Media, by means of graphic evidences of their own design projects which would be showing their skills as novel professional designers.

Keywords:

Personal Branding, Social Media, Positioning, b-learning, Flipped Classroom.