Working with SpeedySignsUSA has been an exciting challenge in that it's a very politically driven brand, focusing on campaign signage and by extension: campaign marketing. When SSUSA asked me to create videos for their brand, what they really were asking for was a templated video layout I could use across their entire collection of Help and How-To Videos.
TEMPLATE CHALLENGES
This has provided me with a number of design challenges from typeface to general layout. The templates should provide quick and simple designs without taking political sides; but most importantly, it had to feel like the go-to resource for all things political signage.
BREAKING THE TEMPLATE DOWN
Taking into account the responsibilities SSUSA placed upon me, I took to designing a clean template, using soft gradients and a general non-descript blue background for the main footage.
The opening sequence uses each of the core three colors the SpeedySignsUSA logo contains, red, blue and black and each 'slide' contains elements from the logo itself as visual cues for the overarching branding of the video.
Ending each video is again the same simple slide, this time ending on Red rather than Blue and the company logo. The template's ease of use comes from the fact that only the text on the opening sequence needs to be changed along with any minor graphical tweaks within the body of the video; the ending however remains the same.
The typeface was inspired however, in my research on political campaigning I was led to President Obama's successful 2008 marketing campaign and took to the visual cues his clean but bold style captured. Using combinations of the font Gotham and Snell Roundhand all of the text in the video captures the presidential feel Obama's campaign team equally captured in their work.