Visual Communication
Project Summary
The idea for this project came three years ago when I was talking to a former roommate about her senior project. At the time, I was not a communication major but, I had the idea to create a social media campaign to talk about mental health. Three years later, I am now a communication major and finally bringing this idea to life.
My project is a social media campaign in the style of “Humans of New York.” I will be interviewing people with mental health disorders. I will then take some portraits of them. I will then transcribe the interviews and find aspects of the interviews I like to use as captions for social media posts.
The final part of my project was an event that I had planned in which I would’ve had speakers there to discuss their lives with mental health disorders and how they are affected by them. But due to COVID-19 restrictions, the event had to be canceled and I opted to film sit-down interviews with the speakers to post on social media instead.
Throughout this project, I ran into various problems. The biggest one I ran into was having my event canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions. When that happened, I was disappointed, but I had to sit down and figure out what to do. And while I could not do what I originally planned for; I was able to turn a disappointment into something better. I was able to sit down with two of my speakers and have an in-depth discussion about life with a mental disorder.
I also got to do a lot of work with branding. I have never been really strong in branding, but I was able to work on branding. This included different iterations of logos, style guides and a web mockup. These assets taught me about how important is to nail down your style guide from the beginning and how helpful that can be later once all the decisions have been made.
The biggest surprise came through in the form of Instagram. Within a week of launching my Instagram account, I had gained 100 followers. This growth was amazing to me, it showed me that there was a place for this account and for the message I want to share. That there is hope and that no one is alone.