About Recharging You
Our goal is to inspire, motivate, and guide creatives to realize and apply their expertise through training, coaching, and creative activities.
Recharging You was created to support creative entrepreneurs who are working to grow and expand their business. It’s a place where creatives can develop their skills and learn how to utilize their natural talents to build their ideal business and do the work they love. It’s made up of both individual and group coaching services, in-depth, step-by-step courses as well as live on-line and in-person workshops and events.
RECHARGING YOU IS…
Recharging You is a place where ideas are shared, challenged, and strengthened allowing you to create satisfying work while establishing a rewarding source of income.
Our coaching groups are a safe place to get critical, constructive feedback from a knowledgeable team of fellow entrepreneurs and experts.
Individual coaching helps designers and creatives find their niche and learn to focus on and be known for something specific.
Recharging You is a source for challenge activities and idea generating components which allow you to explore and stretch yourself creatively.
We produce project prompts, courses, and exercises that highlight different areas of the creative process. Each activity is much like an individual link that make up the creative process chain, each link adding to the system.
Recharging You has exercises for the entire range of the creative process. This is some of the content that will be covered in courses, blogs, and other resources:
- listening skills
- marketing tactics
- creative block breakers
- idea generation techniques
- collaboration methods
- team building activities
- doubt busters
- presentation do’s and don’ts
- confidence builders
Our Team
diane gibbs
DESIGNER, EDUCATOR, HOST
I consider myself a designer first, although I am also an entrepreneur, business owner, consultant, and a college professor. I started professionally designing in 1996 and have fallen deeper in love with design each year. I started my design firm in August of 2002 just before moving to begin my second career as a design professor at the University of South Alabama (Mobile, Alabama). My design firm, little bird communications, has grown every year since but I was working a lot and connecting with professional designers less and less. One reason was because of my location and the other was my busy schedule, between clients and teaching it didn’t leave a lot of time to recharge my batteries.
Working almost everyday for the past ten years I knew I needed inspiration and interaction with other designers but time was tight and I didn’t have the budget to go to more than one conference a year. I read a lot and have a summer filled with mowing grass and listening to podcasts and books. I was growing as much as I could but I knew there was something more. After applying for a position at my alma mater (Auburn University) and not even getting an interview, I started searching for ways to grow and connect with other people in the industry. I started a web show/podcast in the summer of 2012 and started interviewing designers, illustrators, typographers, professors, business experts, authors, and finally started to feel connected. My growth as a designer and professor skyrocketed. But I enjoyed being able to share what I was learning with others live, creating a community of engaged creatives that are smart and have some serious business savvy.
Throughout 2014, I created my first packaged course [Finding Your SuperPower & Telling Your Story] and worked on the Recharging You brand. Through my weekly web show, Design Recharge, I have built an audience of talented and passionate creatives who are challenging themselves by consistently learning and pushing themselves in their creative projects.
Ashleigh Barkley
BEST ASSISTANT EVER
Ashleigh Barkley joined Design Recharge as diane’s scheduling assistant in 2013 and is a critical part of the team. As a former student of diane’s, she appreciated diane’s commitment to uplifting members of the design community through education and insight during the weekly podcasts and is excited to be a part of the team.
She says she teaches “pre-intro to typography” as a preschool teacher. She’s one of the first to build the foundations of letter formation, composition, and creative problem solving in her students’ educational career. Her students’ favorite letter is the lower case i, because it’s the letter with the little tittle (and no tail). Her earliest memory of being exposed to fine art was seeing The Goldfish by Henri Matisse at the age of 6. She considers it an honor to have to opportunity to facilitate those moments in the next generation.
Her grandparents had a vital role in kindling her love for graphic design and photography. Her childhood was spent dissecting issues of National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and Conde Nast Traveler and snapping photos with a hand-me-down Kodak Instamatic. Ashleigh is a wife and mother to two human and two canine kids. She’s teaching the human kids to be confident artists and the canines teach her to slow down and enjoy simple pleasures like a long walk on a shady lane.
Sarah Barnes
GRAPHIC DESIGN INTERN
Sarah started in the Summer of 2019 as an intern, specifically doing work for the Design Recharge podcast. With Sarah on the team we have been able to expand our show notes area and add transcription to each episode. Sarah is in charge of creating each episode’s promotion graphics. Her addition to the team has been pivotal to the growth of the podcast, she is driven and focused.
