Social Rebrand for
for Channel 4
Channel 4 were due a rebrand, and I was tasked with creatively directing the social toolkit and guidelines as part of the rollout.
An enormous social ecosystem
As a ‘digital first’ brand, we needed to cover a lot of use cases. Paid ads, organic content, digital originals, and branded partnerships are just a few examples, across all social platforms and formats.
I chose a brilliant partner in Stink Studios to develop the new templates tasking them for it to feel as native as possible, ensuring we grab attention and surprise our audiences with the way our content appears, whether they’re tapping or scrolling, traveling up and down, or from left to right.
We use impactful openers, the new brand colour (arsenic green), and unique animations/transitions for how the type appears and how we travel through our edits between content and our gradient worlds.
Social Innovation
The toolkit uses a lot of innovative thinking, not just with the shape and size of the assets but also with how the user interacts with them. For instance on reels and TikTok, the user will scroll past our gradient worlds as they scroll on their device, and the content seamlessly loops, making our assets specific to the functionality of the formats, helping us stand out.
All the toolkits have been built in Adobe Premiere using essential graphics, and the guidelines are accessed online (Binder), using the same drop-down system, ensuring it’s as easy as possible for editors to navigate the system.
I also wanted the Channel 4 tone of voice to come through within the toolkits themselves, as well as the content, so we developed our warning lozenges to use the bold new brand colour… and somehow managed to convince legal to let use some cheeky ‘4mojis’ (when the warnings weren’t too serious).
What the hell are 4moji’s?!
A brand new set of icons specifically drawn for Channel 4, that can be used to represent different types of content or sign-post messaging to help it stand out and provide context.
These little icons have also helped tie our editorial content closer together. We now use the master brand colour and a 4moji within the profile icons/ avatars, differentiating between content types, and ensuring brand attribution back to Channel 4. Incredibly important in the cluttered social ecosystem.
Our static assets like (e.g thumbnails) achieve the same, using gradient colour nudges to create consistency between our video content and static assets.
YouTube End Cards
Our YouTube End Cards are also incredibly bespoke, animating with a flourish at the end of our organic content and enabling the YouTube UI elements to appear on screen in a considered layout, strengthening the potential of the user’s onward journey to more Channel 4 content.
Just the tip of the (arsenic-green) iceberg
This is just a flavour of the new toolkit.
9 social platforms with multiple formats across each, and all the different use cases are covered within the system… and so far the feedback from the teams that use them (About 100 people or so) has been incredibly positive.
Hopefully, the audience will like them too.
