Despite these numbers, the topic of "periods" remains largely taboo. With the launch of my brand Lutealism, I hope to create awareness of menstrual disorders and empower menstruators to release the shame associated with their periods. While considering my brand's voice and goals, I aimed to create a visual identity that felt raw and unapologetic. Drawing inspiration from the weathered, tattered posters scattered across New York's subways, I designed my brand's primary assets in Adobe Illustrator. This included a logo, a wordmark, a color palette, and a typography suite. Once I was satisfied with the individual elements, I turned to Kittl to mockup all of the elements together. Kittl's plug-and-play templates made it ridiculously easy to organize my assets into brand guidelines.

With my brand identity created, I moved on to designing a website. Though I was once a devoted Myspace profile customizer, I admittedly know little about coding. Thankfully, Shopify made it simple to get my website up and running. When creating my website, my brand's visual identity needed to be consistent and easily recognizable. Shopify's sleek templates made it easy for me to showcase my brand's style while maintaining an easy-to-navigate experience with room to expand. In the future, I hope to post blogs and share community resources.

Last, but certainly not least, it was time to launch across socials! I created profiles on all the major platforms, but I found Instagram to be my favorite for community building. Being an avid fan of designing from bed, I used the Adobe Express mobile app to create a suite of social post templates. By templatizing my social posts, I'm able to create posts on the fly whenever the inspiration strikes.