MyAdvocate

Background

Estate planning has a reputation of being paperwork-heavy, emotionally-fraught, and only for the rich.

MyAdvocate’s goal is to make the process of creating a will or trust accessible to all. They challenged us to create a brand that embodies warmth and encouragement, and apply that brand to a marketing site. Their founder had created a library of content to educate consumers on the estate-planning process, and so it was important to leverage this as a marketing tool.

My role

I collaborated with another designer to develop the brand, and executed all web design—from information architecture, to visual design, to creating a style guide that MyAdvocate’s team could apply to the product itself.

Approach

Injecting warmth and trust into an emotionally-fraught process

MyAdvocate had a few elements of their existing brand they wanted to preserve—such as organic shapes and the color green—but for the most part we started fresh. We created moodboards to compose a palette that was warm and refined, and leaned into a few points of inspiration to create the logo: historic legal typefaces, the legacy of trees, and the language of documents. Leah created all of the spot illustrations for the site.

The logo leaned into the metaphor of trees for leaving a legacy.

Leah and I developed a color palette and brand direction that conveyed warmth and security.

Leading with clarity, expertise, and value

For the homepage, I tried to balance a sense of warmth and humanity—many people look for estate planning help during a time of stress or crisis—with clarity surrounding the different plans and ease of use. The main CTA directs users to the assessment, a series of questions that creates a personalized plan for each user.

The main CTA directs users to the assessment, a series of questions that creates a personalized plan for each user.

For the homepage, I tried to balance a sense of warmth with clarity surrounding the different plans and the product’s ease of use.

The site aimed to make estate planning easy to consider from mobile, or anywhere you are.

Creating a robust library of knowledge

The MyAdvocate team has decades of experience in estate planning, and they don’t want all of their expertise to be gated. One of our main marketing and SEO strategies was to create a robust library of editorial content to establish MyAdvocate as an expert in the field.

Paul Rabelais, MyAdvocate’s resident expert, has hundreds of Youtube videos explaining the estate planning process. We wanted to leverage that content on the site, so we made sure to include a dedicated video experience, and collections of content for different topics.

MyAdvocate’s goal with the learning editorial platform was to equip users with the knowledge they needed to confidently manage their estate planning.

We leveraged the founder’s robust library of educational videos via a dedicated video experience, and content collections for different topics.

One of our main marketing and SEO strategies was to create a robust library of content to establish MyAdvocate as an expert in the field.

Outcomes

MyAdvocate’s internal engineering team was slated to apply our branding to the product, so we worked closely with their designer to hand off a detailed, usable Figma style guide and make sure they had everything that they needed.

The MyAdvocate team was thrilled with our brand and marketing site, and they were acquired shortly afterwards by Origin in 2023.

Team

Kris Kiger (Design director), Leah Schmidt (Senior product designer and illustrator), Austin Evarts (Product manager), Andrew Tejerina (Strategist), development by the MyAdvocate team