The Evolution of My Personal Brand

Personal branding is one of those things designers tend to overthink. We know too much about colour theory, typography, positioning. We know what a "good" brand looks like. And somehow, that knowledge makes it harder — not easier — to just be something.

This is the story of how mine evolved. Not in a straight line. More like a sketchbook.

It Started With a Zine

Back in college I made a zine. It wasn't called a brand at the time — it was just a project that felt more honest than most things I was producing. The zine was called Pukka.

The word comes from British informal slang: genuine, excellent, proper. But what drew me to it wasn't the dictionary definition — it was the feeling behind it. The idea that something handmade, considered, slightly imperfect and entirely intentional carries a weight that polished-from-the-start things never quite do.

The zine itself looked like that feeling. Anatomical diagrams torn from old medical textbooks. Hand-lettered type, rough and deliberate. Pages that didn't pretend to be finished — they showed the working. One spread even had a bracketed placeholder that read "insert captivating quote here." I kept it in. It felt more honest than filling it with something borrowed.

Pukka was never really about the object. It was about the process of making it. The micro-decisions. Do you use this texture or that one? Does the type sit here or bleed off the edge? Should this feel raw or refined? Each choice is small. But stack enough of them and they become a point of view.

That's what I was trying to name: the slow, quiet curation that happens when you're making something and nobody's watching yet.

Pukka Kreative — From Zine to Instagram to Portfolio

The zine became an Instagram. The Instagram became a brand. Pukka Kreative was the name I took into my first portfolio — a clean, minimal setup showing logo work and early web projects.

And it worked, in a way. The aesthetic was coherent. The work looked considered. But something was quietly off, and it took me a while to name it.

Pukka Kreative was a brand about creativity. It wasn't a brand about me. There's a difference, and clients feel it even when they can't articulate it.

The Rebrand Nobody Asked For (But I Needed)

Here's the thing about rebranding yourself: it feels enormous from the inside and completely invisible from the outside. The people who follow your work just see a name change. You've been through an identity crisis.

I dropped Pukka Kreative and went with Hendri. Just the name. Just me.

There's a small joke built into it that I enjoy more than I should. I'm South African, and back home people often call me Hendrik — the full, formal, slightly-too-serious version. The logo actually shows the K — but it's scratched out. It's right there, visible, and deliberately crossed off. A nod to where the name comes from without being precious about it. For people who know, it lands. For everyone else, it's just a detail that makes the mark feel considered.

What the Brand Is Now (And What It's Still Becoming)

The Pukka philosophy never actually went away. It just got more personal.

What I'm trying to do now — and honestly, still figuring out — is push more of myself into the portfolio without losing the clarity that makes it useful. That's a real tension. A portfolio has a job to do: it needs to communicate quickly, show the right work, make someone feel like hiring you is an easy decision.

But the most interesting thing I can offer isn't the finished work. It's the thinking behind it. The questions I ask before I start. The decisions I make mid-process that nobody sees. The moment a project shifts from this could be anything to this is the thing it needs to be.

That's still what Pukka meant. And it's still what Hendri is trying to say.

The bigger shift happening in parallel is harder to ignore. Technology is changing what design work looks like — fast. The tools are smarter, the outputs are quicker, and the bar for what counts as "good" is moving in real time. In that context, a designer's brand isn't just about aesthetics anymore. It's about where you add value in a process that's increasingly automated. For me, that's still the thinking. The taste. The ability to ask the right question before anyone opens a file.

The brand will keep evolving because the work keeps evolving. That feels right.