LDS YouTube Branding
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Flagship YouTube channel needed a consistent brand. They needed a thumbnail branding system to organize and communicate to viewers how to group similar videos together, as well as identify if they were part of a miniseries that needed to be visually connected. I developed a brand system for them that marked their four core categories of content, as well as a basic template for integrating other content into their channel.
Moodboards: The first step was to collect examples of other channels with similar communication goals, and I recommended elements they should incorporate from each example into their own thumbnail identity. I also educated them about best practices for YouTube and presented user research to support those recommendations.
Concepting: After a final mood board was chosen, I created several concepts for the client to choose from and explained the strengths and emphasis of each. This process continued for three rounds until the top three were selected. From there, a final concept was chosen with a few tweaks to capture the best elements of all the concepts.
Final Version: Once the final version of the thumbnails was established, I presented them to other stakeholders at the Church, who were very happy and excited about the new direction. Then, my team and I applied the new look to the channel's back catalog and all videos moving forward. The end result is a much more unified page that communicates the Church's brand and gives its flagship channel's videos a recognizable and click-worthy appearance when viewed in a user's video feed.
