Hi! My name is Katelyn Quast. I am a communications major with an emphasis in digital and social media at Brigham Young University-Idaho. As I finish up my time here at BYU-I, I am looking forward to applying all of the communication and professional skills I have learned throughout my schooling and through completing this project to my future career. Now, for a deep dive into my project below.
Project Overview:
For this project, I took on Recovery Underway as a client. Recovery Underway is a trauma-informed life coaching business focused on helping primarily women to overcome betrayal trauma, build healthy boundaries, build self-worth, and feel empowered. When I started this project, Recovery Underway had a name, a logo, and an idea behind how it was going to work, but my job was to make Recovery Underway come to life. I accomplished that throughout this project by developing a brand style guide, developing a website, and starting an Instagram account for Recovery Underway.
The Style Guide:
The first step to building Recovery Underway was to build out a style guide to set the brand colors, logos, fonts, voice, and inspiration. Because Recovery Underway is primarily geared toward a female audience, I decided that this style guide needed to be geared toward them. This is shown through the choice of a softer color pallet to communicate safety, hope, and comfort, and with the brand voice focusing on empowerment and sending messages of hope and healing. I also chose to use san serif fonts to create a clean, modern, and minimalistic look.
The Website:
Building Recovery Underway’s website was the meat of this project. I wanted to make sure I built a clean, easy-to-use website so that the clients of Recovery Underway could quickly navigate it and get the help they need. Just like any good website, I started by building a wireframe with text and images on Adobe XD, as shown below.
The next step was to build the website! I decided to build out this website using WordPress with the Divi theme. Many of the different visual elements on the website I had to create through Canva, Photoshop, and Illustrator to bring the brand vision to life. Throughout my building process, I made many changes to make the website look cleaner, more modern, and easier to use. You can access the finalized website below to see how it has transformed!
Recovery Underway’s Instagram:
When creating Recovery Underway’s Instagram profile, I wanted to create a profile that would have good SEO while still appealing to women going through trauma in their lives. I did this by utilizing Google Trends to see what words people looked for the most. Using words in the profile such as life coach, empower, resilience, goals, etc. did well on Google Trends and fit the brand voice.
I also had to come up with content pillars and a posting schedule. I decided because it was a new brand, that I was going to post every day to grow the brand’s presence. I have been building this content based off of three content pillars: Education, Tools, and Inspiration. The education pillar includes content about the coach (Rebecca McKinley), about Recovery Underway, and about life coaching in general. The tools content pillar includes content about different tools people can use when experiencing trauma, anxiety, etc to bring their bodies back to homeostasis. Lastly the inspiration pillar includes inspirational quotes to motivate others.
In the past 4 weeks of posting, I have been able to grow Recovery Underway’s social media presence. This profile went from zero followers to 67 followers at the time of this post. I have been able to learn more about Recovery Underway’s audience and to figure out what sticks well with them. To see Recovery Underway’s Instagram, follow the link below!
Project Summary:
I am very proud of the project I have completed. Although it was a lot of work, I was able to take Recovery Underway as an idea and bring it to life. I have been able to practice my writing, editing, visual, graphic design, and communication skills to complete this project. As a result, I feel more prepared to enter the workforce with confidence in the skills I have developed.