JOANN needed help developing a new video program to position its social presence as an educator and ally for its customers.

The majority of my work focused on developing the strategy for the new video program, the architecture for how to organize video topics, thumbnail design, and filming and editing each video.

Approximately 40% of my workload supported seasonal campaign design where I developed logo lockups and the look and feel of individual campaigns across print and digital channels. A collection of that work can be found at the end of this case study.

Services:

Video & Motion Graphics

Identity Design

Print & Digital Asset Design

Archi-
tecture

[data-wf-bgvideo-fallback-img] { display: none; } @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { [data-wf-bgvideo-fallback-img] { position: absolute; z-index: -100; display: inline-block; height: 100%; width: 100%; object-fit: cover; } }

Set
Design

Filming

Editing

Thumb-
Nails

Videos

"Jake helped lead and implement a new video program for JOANN. He was instrumental in not only the creative but also the strategy of our new video process for the rest of the team."

— Kerry Lehrke / Creative Director

Daily
Design

The business problems:

A desire to position the brand as an educator and ally to the customer at every touchpoint.

A lack of informative and educational video content on all social channels.

No formal process for planning, filming, editing, and uploading a library of video resources for customers.

What I executed:

Established a process for working with internal craft experts to plan video content, camera shot lists, voiceover, and product photography.

Developed a content strategy for categorizing videos based on difficulty, current trends, new product, fun hacks, and product guides.

Shot planned, filmed, and edited a library of high-quality educational videos while leveraging motion graphics and thumbnail design.

Dive deeper

I designed a wide breadth of campaign deliverables on a week-to-week basis.

I also strategized, filmed, and edited a new video content program.

I assembled the set including lighting and material decisions.

The content plan was to create some new and some existing video categories, but there was no strategy for how to intuitively organize them for customers.

I developed a category architecture to ensure long-term organization.

For easy identification on YouTube, I designed an on-brand mark for each main category.

Followed by on-brand sub category marks.

I used color to identify the difficulty of craft videos, aligning it with in-store sewing class difficulty ratings.

This is the full visual categorization architecture.

I moved on to thumbnail strategy and design, which displays in three ways on YouTube.

It's best to place the video subject on the right, and title and logo on the left.

Title is safe in all layout views

Video category is always visible

Preserves intuitive skimming through video library

Starting from company level to customer segment level

Film execution:

I filmed and directed the talent through videos. Each category had a different style — some were designed for 30 to 60 seconds with only background music, while others were designed for voiceover and articulate instruction. I conceptualized each shot to ensure it was clear and concise for the viewer. My experience was helpful for predicting where transitions would happen and determining which camera I would cut to for each shot. In just a handful of videos I was able to refine the process, cutting down on filming time while increasing the overall quality of each video.

I operated multiple cameras for each shot.