Do you need a Personal Brand in 2025?

Do you really need to spam social media with yourself to matter in 2025?

It feels like it's the only way - being loud and uploading constantly.

Let's go back in time a little first. A typical career path for a designer used to start with learning online. Then finding a first junior job and progressing from there.

After a couple of agency and about a decade you'd have enough skills to potentially start your own agency.

Then on-demand economy happened

It started innocent enough with things like on-demand movie streaming and same-day delivery.

The convenience of being fast eventually reached the general perception. We assume that that way of the old is too long.

After all, we all want to drive a Lambo in our late 20's at best. Not in our 40s. And the best way to do that is through a personal brand.

Do you need a personal brand?

Now this is a tough question. And my advice, coming from someone that in a way has one can feel a little dishonest.

But bear with me. I've been designing since 1998 and joined my first agency job in 2001. Climbed the ladder. Learned the skills. Started my own business.

Our first clients were a local kindergarten, my Mum's company website etc. Low profile, low pay. Low prestige. (sorry Mum!)

After a few years of GOOD WORK™ we managed to score our first bigger client and then it went from there.

However, none of our Fortune500 clients came from Social Media. They all came from referrals. That's because people working in those huge orgs have friends and those friends have smaller businesses. If you do an exceptional job it really spreads.

You don't have to shout it from the rooftops.

Personal brand or online visibility?

Unless you want to be an influencer, you don't need a "personal brand". What you need is showing your work.

Posting to X, Instagram and other platforms makes sense if you post your work only.

Posting to Behance, Dribbble and here, at square.one also makes a lot of sense. Your work is visible to more eyes. Especially when you have 250 designs created in our daily design challenges. You have A LOT of stuff to post and write about.

Engagement farming

But there's a thin line and I now see many designers crossing it. There's a difference with sharing your real work, and engagement farming.

Making a flashy, not-possible to code button or animation falls on the farming side slightly.

But there's something even worse that you can do. AI generated backgrounds (slop) for landing pages with some BS copy and a button.

This has become so widespread it's almost at a breaking point. It's easy likes. You may get a couple thousand followers that way.

But...

The followers you'll get will mostly be other designers or clients that have no idea what good design is really about.

That will put you forever in a loop of mediocrity. Focusing on the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.

Instead

Don't spam. Don't publish things for the sake of likes alone.

Use the daily challenge content you already have and break it down with annotations. Show your process. Show how you're thinking.

Focus on quality engagement, not just a bigger number of followers.

In reality, you only need ONE fortune500 follower to get a great client. Or 50,000 clueless startups that want a no-code template with clouds in it.

This is ending

I am happy to see that this is slowly ending. This tactic is working less and less anymore.

Most engagement you get is from other designers that want to copy your fancy animation. And they do it for their own likes and followers.

There are some clients to get from that, but rarely good ones. They start to realize it's not about a fancy, AI generated visual. If they want to win they need an actual design.

Not a pretty graphic that took five minutes to make.

And I love to think that I may have slightly contributed to this with some of my recent videos like this one:

Bottom line

If you want to be a successful freelance ux/ui designer in 2025 you need to play it smart. Don't stoop down to the lowest engagement farming level.

Growth in numbers is an illusion. You need some exposure, sure. But you also need to be known for being a designer.

Not an AI-generator.

That's why we have that information architecture challenge here as well. All those skills is what makes your personal brand actually personal.

Copying others for clicks won't.

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