When I was on one of my last projects at college, we had to come up with a personal brand to market ourselves as freelance or to agencies – to theme portfolio websites, business cards etc.
My starting point was ‘Seven’, for the following reasons:
• My Mum’s date of Birth is 7/5
• My date of birth is 7/10
• The house I lived in from age 2 to 18 was number 7.
• When we were on holiday in Portugal in 1997, I read an article in kid’s newspaper ‘The Funday times’ (included in ‘the Sunday times’ paper) about a graffiti artist called Dreph. I started noticing graffiti in cities around me and got into it, which ultimately led me to taking art and design subjects in School, and going on to graphic design in college.
• This was re-inforced by an old e-mail address I had, ‘ache97’, and finding I was in Elph’s (local hero) phone book as ‘Ben 97’.
• Using the moniker ‘Seven’ for design work, when I first joined Facebook I was quite skeptical about being traceable through a social network, so I called myself ‘Ben Seven’. I started to be referred to as Ben Seven, and this handle even permeated into my first design job (which I’m still in now) and my personal ‘brand’ is pretty much a pseudonym now.