At one time if you wanted to set up a website to sell your photography, jewelry or pottery online you would go to a webmaster and tell them what you wanted it to look like. Hopefully, he or she would listen to you and soon they would upload a website to sell your artwork on. But it can be a nightmare too, as I found out. Besides being very expensive.
Venues like Etsy, 1000 Markets and other selling sites were a blip on the horizon at that time. Wonderful places that would make our lives so much easier. In some cases you still had to have someone do the banner and avatar. But after working with Photoshop or other editing software for a while most artists caught on how to do them.
It is so much fun making an avatar. In fact many artists change their avatar every few months. I know I fell into that practice. I had a leopard, jaguar, pronghorn and baby, black cat and a black kitten. Every one of my sites, from my website to my Flickr page had a different animal on it. Everyone of them a wonderful creation. Not one of them had brand recognition.
I never gave brand recognition a minute of thought until on day while watching the Martha Stewart show. Everything changed. I can't remember the woman's name, but I won't forget what she said about brand recognition. You want your brand logo, avatar, stationary, and banner to be uniform.
Out went all the animals and I settled on one avatar. One of my most popular card photographs, my Birthday Cat Hamlet. My banner was standardized as well. Now no matter which of my online sites someone comes to they know they are in a Celtic Cat Photos shop.
