Background

Show Business is a 20-episode show and certification course about creating a show for your brand. It was created in-house by our Studios team, and the Marketing Design team worked closely with the Studios team and some awesome freelancers to build out this brand and carry it through the show.

When the bulk of my work began, there was a lot of great work already in place. Our Art Director, David Sizemore, had cast a vision for the show and the types of scenes the team could cut between to create a dynamic mix of symmetrical interview shots, seamless color conceptual scenes, and humorous stock footage. Another designer on the team, Michelle Fine, had created a logo reminiscent of neon off of this direction, and our Art Director worked with a freelance animator to bring it to life in the show intro and some title cards throughout.

Treatments from the show

Building out the brand

The goal of my work was to take the logo that had been created and the expression of the brand that existed in video and motion form, and distill and extend it into something that was effective and connected across mediums and contexts. 

This involved taking assets from the show and just trying things. What, when removed, lost the feeling of the show? What, when added, changed the feeling of the show? What was the connective tissue between the promotional elements, and between them and the show?

Graphic Elements

Color

The original color palette had been developed and incorporated into the show before our brand refresh, and was slightly different from our brand palette. I decided to migrate the palette to our brand colors, for simplicity in the web build and assets.

While we wanted the brand to be unique to elevate the show and reflect the level of effort that was put in, we wanted it to have more overlap with our core brand styles than other shows we’d done, because it was closer to our core strategy and featured a certification course that would have longevity.

Iconography

From the flat color shapes and collage style I developed styles for icons and spot imagery that worked into the same visual language.

Typography

Web experience

One of the earliest ways that the brand would be expressed was in the teaser/hype page and, soon after, the landing page and viewing experience. I worked closely with a designer who was, at the time, the designer on the website team (Holly Weinrauch) to explore how the brand styles were expressed in a web setting. 

Our first pass leaned into the bold color, geometric shapes, and collage style. But the feedback we received from stakeholders and our Art Director was that it didn’t feel elevated enough – it needed more emphasis on the footage, and it needed to establish more credibility without losing some very intentional whimsy.

Social ads

Programmatic Display Ads: AdWeek

Swag

To celebrate and further promote the launch, we created a set of gear we called the “Summer Starter Kit”, timed with our early summer release of Show Business. 

Fitting for summer, the design pulls in a palm tree that appeared in some prominent promotional collages, but in the bright color palette. This pattern is collaborative, with the palm tree illustration originating with a teammate. The type is hand-done, and references Show Business without making the towel feel like an advertisement. We mailed these out in custom mailers designed by a fellow designer.

Result

Our launch initially fell short of our ideal MQL’s, and so the team concepted some ways to test some optimizations to the experience. We are continuing to monitor signups, engagement, and certification completions in order to identify future opportunities for promotion. 

© Danielle Bushrow, 2023