There’s a viewpoint I subscribe to when it comes to your voiceover career with regard to promotion, and it’s this: Whenever possible, I want to imagine what you look like rather than actually see you. I’m not alone. My agent (and voiceover industry heavyweight), Dean Panaro of Abram’s Artists volunteered the very same sentiment during our March webinar.
The point is your auditions, demo, and logo (identity) should speak volumes for you before you ever utter a sound. These elements all define you, your aesthetic, your personality, and what makes you professionally valuable.
Therefore, making your name known and associated with being a professional voiceover requires you logo your name in a style that’s:
- Easy to read
- Immediate eye-candy (i.e. appealing and aesthetically elevated to attract potential producers to listen)
- Looks as good as you sound
The primary function of a graphic artist is to create a versatile, memorable logo with the idea being to make your name known and pleasantly memorable to further your professional brand.
READ: Are You Selling The Wrong Type?
(For the record, web design is not typically what a graphic artist offers. These are dramatically different skill sets. Yet, scores of graphic artists will tell you they can manage the web design, and web designers will tell you they can supply graphics for fear they’ll lose the gig. The outcome is either a great website with cheesy graphics or a great graphic that can’t overcome poor web design. If your site can’t be viewed easily on mobile devices where they’re viewed most, there’s no point in being online at all.)
Incorporating engaging text into a clever design seamlessly communicates your value to executive assistants, advertising creatives, producers, casting, and directors well before we ever hear your demos. Your logo further defines your taste level and aesthetics online and on social media. Besides, when you consider you’re marketing your self to advertising creatives (or former advertising creatives), the importance of proper packaging spikes.
Your identity, like your demos, website, and performance are all meant to instill confidence. Are you a complete package or not? Your identity should look as good as your demos sound.
Your graphics need to communicate most to producers, casting, talent agents and their assistants, rather than to you alone. Assistants are often put in charge of sorting through the various submissions, so your identity needs to appeal to them as well.
Much like recording engineers and production, we rarely discover the limits of a graphic artist until you’re already in deep. Limited technical skills can log jam the entire works, especially when you love the design but no one can reproduce the identity as a website, business card, etc. Converting your graphic into multiple formats may be beyond their ability, which is imperative to ensure your brand identity maintain a consistent image.
So how do you art direct your graphics? Keep it to a minimum. Look over the graphic artists’ past work. Determine whether you identify with the mood or style presented in any of their previous logos. Let the graphic artist know what fonts, colors, and layouts of his past work you identify with most. If you find one or two visual images that appeal to you, share them. (Not 5, not 15 suggestions—just a small handful.) Avoid micro-managing.
Concentrate on your logo making your name known. Fonts speak volumes to mood, age range, and humor without being literal. Avoid being too obvious; it’s poor advertising and it limits you as a talent. An effective logo should suggest rather than actually list it.
Like most things in life, if you want something done right, leave it to the professionals. Hire a proper graphic artist who knows the drill.
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The views expressed in this article are solely that of the individual(s) providing them,
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
