When working on a series of videos for my YouTube channel about DWM, it became clear that I needed to change things up a bit, from my usual format for thumbnails. The goal here was mainly to create something that was: visually distinct from my normal work, but somewhat similar to one another, so that the audience can could easily distinguish the new series of videos.
More so than other designs I've worked on in the past, the main focus here is meant to be on the actual typography. Most of the time my philosophy with thumbnails is to just create something interesting to look at, and potentially draw a prospective viewer in, and less to identify the subject of the video, as there is always a title right underneath the thumbnail that does that pretty well. However with these videos, I'm working with a fairly recognizable logo (in a very niche space), so it just seemed stupid to not make the actual subject of the video, the main focus of the branding.
The first of these wallpapers was of course based very heavily on the classic Volkswagen newspaper ads that ran during the 60s & 70s (I probably didn't need to tell anyone that). Of course the aesthetic style created here is incredibly beautiful, and I love it for that. But, actually the magazine and newspaper ad format actually just happens to aligned quite nicely with my goals here.
For the second set of thumbnails, I just kept it really simple. It's still bright and clean (in comparison to my normal branding work), and it's still quite easy to just identify the bits of text that are there. But it seemed kind of lazy to just re-use the same format for every single video in this series.
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Like what you see? Contact me, and I'll do the same for you.
For the third video in the series, I had to do a bit more fiddling around. I didn't want to go back to the VW design, and I wanted to do something a bit more complex & interesting. I went about that by using a 3D mesh, but eventually just rendered the wireframe of it, and ended up with something okay.
