When The New York Times began creating multimedia properties, they needed to bring their sprawling and untamed video library up to the design standards of their award-winning publications. With no in-house team able to do so, Work-Order was brought in to establish a strategy for the delivery of the brand’s video offering, as well as a cohesive, hierarchical design system to house the content.

To achieve this, we updated the video landing page to better serve content to viewers; created sections, or a system of channels, that paralleled the print and website experiences; branded all videos with a powerful logo mnemonic; designed a system to help visually differentiate content by subject, tone, type and length; and created an easy-to-implement video toolkit for use in the existing editing software.

First, we altered the Times’ iconic, blackletter “T” to include a play button so viewers could quickly identify a thumbnail as a Times video. The film flash animation and rich-toned audio cue act as palate cleansers after the pre-roll advertisement and set the stage for the content.

A hierarchical titling system

From breaking news to full-length features, we used the classic structure of a newspaper to guide our design process, with the sections acting as a house of brands falling under The New York Times’ mother brand. We assigned minimally invasive graphic treatments to news pieces and a big, bold intentional style to culture and fashion pieces. Short and long-form documentaries received longer, rolled-out title sequences.