Client Spotlight – Kellyn Roth Instagram Branding
Client Spotlight
Kellyn Roth Instagram Branding
See how I transformed this historical fiction author’s scattered branding into a cohesive visual framework that tells the story of her personality and books.
Project Scope
“”I hired Catherine Thompson at Attisa to help me with my ever-faltering Instagram aesthetic. I struggle mightily to define my aesthetic for Instagram and in general, so being able to look to someone to put all my miscellaneous ideas together in a cohesive way was absolutely necessary.” – Kellyn
Services
Instagram Branding
Canva Templates (Single Post and Carousel)
Project Goals
To create cohesive branding for Kellyn Roth’s author Instagram profile, and then develop that branding into easy-to-use Canva templates for her to edit and use regularly in her posts.
Project Design Overview
Kellyn described her ideal brand aesthetic as “Vintage cottagecore academia, feminine but a 20th century way.” Vintage, feminine, rustic, and cottagecore—those were the different design styles we wanted to meld together seamlessly. Kellyn’s design style is not necessary minimalistic, but is straightforward and no-fuss, just like her brand voice. Read my individual notes on each part of the process below 👇
See what she’s done with the branding and templates
Client Industry and Content
Kellyn is an author and publisher of Christian historical women’s fiction and romance. Her Instagram content encompasses aspects of “writing lifestyle”, while her books are, in her words, “somewhat entertaining and melodramatic in that BBC drama way, but they also take on really heavy, serious, real-life themes.” In order to represent this visually, I wanted to incorporate some literary icons alongside some vintage countryside elements.
Client Vision
Kellyn’s goal for this project was to get cohesive branding and “some pieces in place”for her Instagram so that she could batch create and schedule posts and trust that her visuals and branding was already taken care of. She wanted “clear, cohesive Instagram feed that looks pretty and accurately portrays my brand, personality, and so on without looking too washed out/boring.”
Kellyn had some color suggestions and a general design aesthetic in mind. She already had two purple colors in use on her website and graphics, and wanted to incorporate more of a rustic color palette that would meld well together with current image colors and the purple brand colors. She was wanting particularly to add a brown and green color, and had tried to in the past. I added two browns that I felt really captured a homey cabin feel, as well as a pastel dark green that tied in well with both rustic vibes and played beautifully with the lilac colors. The light grey served as a good neutral, and includes a hint of sage so it will look good as a background.
Kellyn already used a main script font, and used a serif font similar to the Cormorant Garamond Thin I added to her brand fonts. The alternate header font was added to provide contrast to the formal Cormorant font and further develops the rustic feel in a professional way.
As far as elements, I knew from another project with Kellyn that she liked watercolor elements. From her request for a “cottagecore” and “feminine” vibe, along with her brand Pinterest board, we incorporated wildflowers into her elements and photography collections. I also incorporated some vintage elements and cabin and forest mountains clip art, to really bring her rustic cabin aesthetic to life and pair that with things that reflect her historical fiction genre.
Creating an image style was one of my favorite parts of the project. Using both her design style and brand Pinterest board, I was able to find stock photography that beautifully reflected a cottagecore and vintage look. I gave her general image guidelines and subject ideas, along with two curated folders of free stock photography images.
I wanted to create template designs that were not too simple, but not too busy. Her accent font is a beautiful handwritten script font, and I incorporated that throughout the single-post templates whenever possible. Look how she’s used them and made them her own! All the templates were designed in and delivered through Canva, a free user-friendly graphic design platform
Carousel Templates
For the final piece of the project, I created a dual-color carousel template for Kellyn to use in her informational posts. She creates a lot of longer-form content, both about her books and content to teach writers. I designed these templates so she would have a clear and on-brand way to share this content, as well as helping her get the higher post engagement rates that carousels often offer content creators.
Results
“I can now much more easily work on putting my feed together.”
“She helped me by putting together a brand aesthetic and one specifically for Instagram, picking out the elements I needed, and setting me up with templates to help me move forward. I deeply needed this help, and it was done very well, so I can now much more easily work on putting my feed together.””