Designing for People & the Planet: Personal Branding Photography with Kat Ashton, Service Designer
Personal branding photography for consultants and creatives · Nottingham · East Midlands
“Omg LOVE LOVE LOVE
I’m OBSESSED, thank you xx”
When a client responds to their gallery like that ^ , it's a very good day.
Kat Ashton booked a personal branding shoot with me to mark a significant moment, the launch of her own consultancy. Kat is a Service Designer, sometimes referred to as a strategic designer, which means she works with businesses to create and improve their service experiences. And not just any businesses, Kat's work has a big focus on sustainability. She designs for people and for the planet, and that ethos runs through everything she does.
Which meant a white wall and a laptop was never going to cut it.
The brief: ditch the corporate, embrace the natural
Kat came to me knowing exactly what she didn't want. The stiff, static, ‘here-I-am-in-front-of-my-desk’ kind of image that fills LinkedIn and says very little about the person behind the work. She wanted something that reflected her brand values at a glance, something that felt natural, grounded, alive.
The answer was to take her outside entirely. To put her in the natural world she designs to protect, and let that environment tell part of her story.
What we hadn't fully anticipated was just how well that would work, but more on that in a moment.
Movement as a visual language
Kat has a background in dance and yoga, and this was something we wanted to weave deliberately into the shoot rather than leave at the door. The most powerful images aren't the ones where someone is standing still and smiling nicely. They're the ones where something of the person's actual energy makes it into the frame.
For Kat, that meant movement. Flowing, completely natural movement that brought a fresh, almost artistic quality to the images and set them apart from anything a standard headshot session could have produced. The combination of the natural outdoor setting and Kat's ease with her own body made for images that feel genuinely unlike anything else and that's exactly the point.
When you're launching a consultancy in a competitive space, standing out visually isn't vanity - It’s a strategy.
What personal branding photography is really for
Kat's shoot is a great example of something I talk to clients about a lot. Personal branding photography isn't just about having a nice photo for your website. It's about communicating at a glance, before someone has read a single word, who you are, what you value, and why you're different.
For a service designer whose whole practice is built around human-centred, sustainable thinking, images that placed her in nature and showed her as someone physically present and in motion said all of that without a caption. That's the work good personal branding photography does.
And Kat's reaction when she saw the gallery? That's the thing I live for.
There's also a Part Two to Kat's personal branding journey, which you can read here where we took the story even further.
If you're a consultant, designer or professional in Nottingham, Lincolnshire or across the East Midlands who's ready for personal branding images that actually reflect who you are and what you stand for, not just what you do then I'd love to have a conversation.
