YouTube Channel Branding & Management
I create branding for my YouTube channel called Random Sarah Grace; this consists of YouTube thumbnails for every video, a watermark on every video, constant editing of the videos in-line with brand guidelines, an intro on every video. Alongside this I manage the channel's monetisation, analytics, content, schedule and social media pages including Instagram and Facebook. Some videos require more specialised editing with music, audio syncing and voiceovers. I always use the Adobe Creative Suite, for design purposes, Final Cut Pro for video editing, and occasionally audacity for normalising voice.
This the channel's logo. I wanted to associate "RSG" with "Random Sarah Grace" because I use the shortened version in video titles and for the watermark. The ombre effect is a modern way to represent the ocean which matches the theme of my channel - to make relaxing videos. Also, if you look closely you can see the t-shirt in the background says "sleep", again relating to the channel's theme. There's a picture of myself in the background to represent identity for my channel of Random Sarah Grace.
Currently, this is the channels cover, I feel it's very modern and minimalistic. I used some opacity again but to show a car because it shows variety in my channel. I personally love cars and all vehicles, so I wanted my personality to be shown in the channel.
With the thumbnails I keep an opacity design effect - as I do within my logo and across my branding. This design is part of one of my older thumbnails. I would take a still photo within Final Cut Pro, import to InDesign, and use the same template but change the wording and make the border match with a colour already in the photo. This would then be exported as a JPEG and uploaded to all my social media outlets.
Here is another example of the older thumbnail design. I moved the orientation of the text from the left to the centre and dropped the capitals on the second row, this made it seem less harsh and focused the eye towards the centre of the picture. I also cropped the boxes' white space around the text to make the text more edgy.
This thumbnail shows my experimentation with a different font to add more information of the video. You can also see how I've added more white space around the text in the boxes, I feel this looks more comfortable than the previous design.
2017 Thumbnails
From here my thumbnails changed to appear more comfortable and fun by the use of borders, colour design, and a different title. Below you can see the current thumbnail design I use across the videos.
I made elements within this "Butter Slime" thumbnail in Photoshop using the masking tool - this is how I got the slime image at the top with a white background. I chose to add emoji's and a picture of slime because I wanted this thumbnail to appear fun and to attract younger audiences of 10-15 seen as Slime is a trend within Instagram and younger children.
Example of Music and Voiceover editing
Within this video you can hear 3 different audio tracks. 2 audio tracks are music based, these are from NCS which are commercially copyright free as long as you credit the creator, and there's one voiceover audio track. I made the volume of the music tracks higher when I wasn't speaking, and the volume of the music tracks in general lower so you could hear the voice louder than the music. There's nothing worse than hearing music at the same volume of a voiceover!
Thanks for viewing this project! It's a channel with design adaptions and experiments as it grows.
