This summer I’m on a quest to create an online image of myself — a “brand”, so to speak. I’ve standardized my profile pictures, curated my accounts, redesigned my resume, and am currently working on designing and implementing a custom personal website (this site!) to showcase my work and house a personal blog.

Today I turn 21 (yay!), so I think it’s fitting that I reassess myself through this branding process. On the one hand I’m doing this to bolster my profile for job recruiters, but I think it helps me get a better understanding of who I want to be and what I want to do. Personal branding sounds like putting on a mask and placing limits on oneself, but I don’t see it that way. To me, it seems like a means of focusing myself — separating what I really am from the noise of what others expect of me.

The site has been a project in the works for nearly two years (and still is!). I knew I wanted my own personal website, but I wanted it to be something unique and personal to me. This immediately precluded the use of templates and site builders. As someone who has done a fair number of site building projects, mostly for the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to simply create my own.

I immediately hit several roadblocks when I finally sat down to build my own site. The first was a lack of design ideas. How did I want my site to look? What colors would I use? What should I put on it? When I first sat down two years ago to build the site, I especially fussed over the last question, because I felt I had nothing worthy of putting on the site. I barely had any side projects (most were tiny, unfinished exploratory projects) and I didn’t think I had what it took to keep a regularly updated blog.

Even after I had accumulated items that I could place on the site and built up the courage to start a blog, I continued to struggle. What would it look like? I played with several different color schemes using color theme generators and found none to my liking. Something that seemed so simple, just picking two or three colors and mixing and matching backgrounds and fonts suddenly seemed so hard. Despite having nearly seven years of studio art experience, I found my self utterly lost on how to create the look and feel of the site.

My inspiration suddenly came a few days ago from an unlikely place: my resume. Partly inspired by the dazzling array of resumes I viewed while scoring HackPrinceton applicants, I decided to completely redesign my resume from scratch. I knew the specific kind of design I wanted — a quick facts on a bar to the left, main experience to the right, a picture on the top left, and my name in big letters across the top. Everything seemed ready to go except the color scheme. (Yes, I wanted my resume to be in color, because I surmised most people would be looking at my resume on a computer screen, and I wanted it to pop.) I instantly recognized this as the same problem I had faced before in choosing a color, but since this was a resume, I decided I would use black text on a white background with a single accent color. The accent color was an easy choice — my favorite color, blue. I identified a few modern looking fonts on Google Fonts (Titllium and Lato looked really nice) and before I knew it, the resume was designed and completed in the span of a few hours. That’s when it occurred to me: this is how I want my site to look.

This brings us to today. Since my site was linked in my resume, I had to quickly launch the site, but the perfectionist in me wanted the site to be perfect before I launched it. I thought about it again and decided I would launch it half finished, and let that motivate me to finish it on a timely schedule. I also hoped this post would be the first piece of substantive content on the site. Though I’m not entirely happy with how the site looks, and it’s far from finished, it’s a start and I’m super excited to continue working on it and watch it grow.

That pretty much sums up the whole story about this website. It serves as the centerpiece of my “branding” process. As I mentioned before I see this as a way of discovering myself, as opposed to painting a new face. For this reason I like to say that though I’ve given myself a new look, I’m still the old me.

Throughout this process I’ve reflected on how I’ve changed and how I’ve stayed constant throughout the years. The pattern generally follows along the lines of school — elementary school me, middle school me, high school me, and now college me. Though college me is in the process of changing too, in subtle but significant ways. A thorough description of how I’ve changed throughout those years would sound really narcissistic and probably fill an entire post so I’ll get to the point. The one thing that hasn’t changed about me is my ambition to do something great with my life. The ways in which I’ve thought about this have gone through many refinements, the latest being looking to technology to change people’s lives, but that too may change. I genuinely believe that life’s object is to do something great for humanity. I do everything with this overarching goal in mind.

Writing this has been fun and helpful for me, and I hope, if you’re still reading, that it didn’t bore you. And now, I shall continue to write about random things to keep this blog going. It’s going to be a fun time. Cya!

~Roland