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Cover image for The Accidental Self Portrait
Chris Jarvis
Chris Jarvis

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The Accidental Self Portrait

A little story about myself, happy accidents, and branding.

Years ago my team was on break at work. Break ended and we have to go back to the backroom. The break room had a frig and general practice was to write your name on stuff so you knew whose stuff was whose. I grabbed the sharpie and jotted my name on my bottle. Then go about my day.

White Pepsi bottle lid with Chris written on it.

End of the day come around and I check the frig for my bottle. It's not there. Not a bunch of bottle in there. So where is mine? All that's here is one someone drew a funny face on.

I turn the bottle a bit, wait it's not a face that's my name.
But a combination of how quickly I wrote, a sharpie, and perspective made it look like a caricature of me. This was before the I had the full beard.

caricature of a face. but it's also the name Chris written vertically. The chin is made from the C, the mouth is and h, a line for R make a nose. the eyes are two dots to make a eye and the S is hair

So I made an accidental self-portrait. I took the scan and tried to make a logo. I recently found the scan I made of the lid. I'm thinking about playing with this for personal branding.

Have you done any personal branding to help make you stand out?

Top comments (1)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

This is so awesome, Chris!! Lovin' that little face. You definitely gotta run with that. 🙌

I got one for ya... my gaming name back in the day was Maddat or Michael Maddat. "Maddat" being a combination of letters from my family's name: Michael - Amine - Dennis - Daniel - Amine - Tharrington.

During college, my girlfriend Katelyn (who became my wife) and I adopted a bunch of cats and had our own little cat colony or outdoor feral cats, haha. At that point in time, I traded in the Maddat monicker for Madcat... eventually transforming it to Michael Madcat.