Topic:

For my senior capstone project, I will be rebranding my travel and lifestyle Instagram account, as well as revamping my blog to correspond with the Instagram account. I have a large passion for travel and have always loved sharing moments from my journeys, and my everyday life, with the world, so rebranding this is something I am very passionate about. I hope to someday work in the travel industry, or related fields, so this will help me in that aspect of my life, as well as recreating and bringing to life a huge personal goal of mine. I am eager to bring the vision that I have in my head to life throughout the semester. 

 

Form:

My project will take the form of the rebranding of my Instagram and blog pages. Here is a link to my current Instagram account, and a link to my current, very rough, blog.  I want readers and viewers to help me create an online community where they feel like they can really get to know me and my life. I want to be open, honest, and transparent with my audience. I want them to experience my life through my account as closely as possible.

 

This is a link to a blog that I love. I would love for the blog aspect of my project to reflect the ease of use that this one does, as well as how aesthetically pleasing the site is. My blog will differ as far as the amount of content and specificity of the content. Mackenzie focuses her blog mainly on fashion, mixing in travel, and travel fashion as well sometimes, but my blog would primarily focus on travel and recapping trips I have taken/will take, with the occasional life update post. Mackenzie has an Instagram account that I love as well. She uses her Instagram to share her fashion and travel as well, but in a different form than her blogs which is similar to my goal. I picked her for my examples because I enjoy how she uses Instagram and blog posts to share her life and her adventures with the community she has built on her platforms. Her Instagram has a heavy fashion focus, and while I may post “fashion-like posts” from time to time that will not be my main focus, so my account will differ from hers in that way. Similarly to her account, I would like to create a preset that gives a similar clean, bright, fun vibe, to her photos. 

 

Audience and Impact:

My primary audience is most likely going to be young women in their upper teens and 20s who have a desire to travel and see the world. I hope to bring a positive light to traveling at a young age, which many find intimidating, and to show the “off-travel” side of my life as well. I think that this project is needed because it will show that a fun life is still possible in the midst of all of the stress that being a woman in your 20s brings. 

 

Prior Experience:

I have prior experience with web design from a college course dedicated to coding and building a personal website. This is my website from that course. I am going to take what I learned in this course and apply it to building my blog on WordPress. In this course, we learned about website design aesthetics, online accessibility, and creating user-friendly websites. All of these skills are going to be crucial in this project for me. 

I have a lot of prior experience with using Instagram. My account, which I linked above, lacks a clean and concise aesthetic and consistency, but I have the skills and knowledge to grow the platform if I put my all into it, which I intend to do. The only part with the Instagram account that I do not have experience with is creating a Lightroom preset. I have used Adobe Lightroom to edit my photos for years so I have a basic understanding of the platform, but I have never created my own preset from scratch before, so this will be new and challenging for me. 

This project will challenge me in new ways to step out of my comfort zone, stay consistent, and by creating a preset from scratch that can be used for the whole semester. I am sure there will be more challenges that arise throughout the semester, but I am prepared to learn as I go and expand my knowledge day by day. 

Educational Experience:

My educational experience in the COM department has given me the tools to know how to create a very successful Instagram account. I have created and experimented with accounts in multiple communications classes during my time at Saint Joseph’s University, and all of the things I learned about what works and what doesn’t will come in handy when completing this project. Design techniques, photography skills, and what people like and don’t like, are just a few of the things I have learned that can be directly applied to this project. 

Research:

I do not need to do extensive research to complete this project, but I will be needing to do surface-level research about preset creation using Lightroom. I have done research on this in the past, nothing formal, on what the various aspects of photography editing includes. I am hoping that the basic knowledge I have will help me in the process of digging deeper into my preset creation. In just a quick YouTube search I had already found hundreds of videos that are on Lightroom preset creation, so getting the information should not be a problem. 

 

Obstacles and Resources:

Some potential obstacles that I foresee in completing my project include not having enough content. I am unsure of my exact travel plans coming up so I may have some content shortages. I have old travel content that could be worked in on an as-needed basis, so I am hoping that will resolve those issues. I also struggle with deciding what to post after having a bunch of photos from somewhere, so this will be an obstacle for me as well. I will need my iPhone camera, Adobe Lightroom, my MacBook Pro, and my Canon PowerShot camera for this project. 

 

Tentative Project Timeline:

My project timeline is very tentative, I will be adjusting as I see fit once I get started. I do not know how many posts I am going to post each week on Instagram, I don’t want to just “post to post”, I want to be proud of everything I am putting out.

 

Weeks 1, 2, and 3: The first three weeks of the semester have been focused on ideas, drafting this project, and getting a full vision for what I want this project to look like going forward. 

Week 4: I am going to be starting with researching how to create a preset on Adobe Lightroom, playing around with these presets, and picking a preset that I will love for the entirety of the semester, and beyond. I will also be creating a new design persona for what I want my Instagram and blog pages to look like. Toward the end of this week, I will start posting with my new aesthetic. 

Week 5: I will be working on getting my blog to match the aesthetic that I built in the previous week with my design persona and new presets. I will also continue with Instagram posting. 

Week 6: I will be posting my first blog post this week and related Instagram content. 

Week 7: I will be posting a YouTube video related to a blog post and promoting it on the blog and Instagram.

Weeks 8-16: For the remaining weeks of the semester I will be posting Instagram content (stories, reels, and posts) and blog content consistently. I will reevaluate my schedule as I see how things are going as far as content creation goes.