In 2023 our in-house design team worked with the talented folks at Roger to create an all-new brand look for the Nick Jr block and channel. After receiving final design files from Roger, I directed a team of animators in categorize and optimize the new rebrand so that it would be ready to send out to international teams, key art department, editors, and any other marketing personnel that may need it. It was important that our brand guidelines be both 'set in stone' and hard to break by external users, as well as flexible and nimble enough to adapt to any design curveball that may be thrown our way by specific project needs (i.e. more characters needed, super long IP titles, removal of background elements on a case-by-case basis, etc).
Once everything was ingested into our cloud server, I started to develop a toolkit system that could be applied to the entire rebrand in a way that was cohesive across the entire library of assets. This involved rebuilding almost every file to be layered in such a way that 3D elements could easily be turned off, turned on, reconfigured and remixed together without having to re-render hefty 4K Cinema 4D files every time a change was needed. I also made mogrts and AE toolkits using custom expressions, so that toolkit files could be locked down to just the essential things that needed changing, streamlining the process of creating new versions and preventing any undesired design edits.
Toolkit Examples
Curriculum Billboard Toolkit
A curriculum billboard is a graphic that plays before every episode of a show to inform (presumably the parents of the child watching) what the key educational aspects of the show are meant to be. Usually there are between 3 and 5 bullet points displayed, along with the show title and a character from the show.
When designing the toolkit, I created one Toolkit comp that has codified options to change the background color, the type and the type's specific layout and spacing. Separate replaceable toolkit comps hold the character art and icon renders and can be swapped in and out as needed.
Promotional Lower Third Toolkit
The lower third is used for every property, and often briefs will call for multiple property logos - or lower thirds with no logos at all - to be used within one set of deliverables. For this reason I built the toolkit to have dropdown menus that allowed logo and character art to be loaded in once up front, then easily swapped in and out on a per-deliverable basis to make versioning fast and easy. The lower third dynamically adjusts length based on the type input into the GUI, and the type sizes and colors are generally standardized and will not need to be adjusted but it was important to build that flexibility into the file in order to anticipate any special use cases down the road.
Endpage Toolkit
Endpages are one of the most often-used cards in the marketing department, next to logo stings and lower thirds. It was important that these toolkits are fast, simple, and as foolproof as possible. I created a type block that dynamically resizes based on whether the input is one, two, or three lines long, or if any line is over a certain length of characters. For maximum readability we never wanted the type to get too small on screen, so there are only two possible sizes that it will ever be. It has options for subtitles and supertitles and dynamically moves if the supertitle is turned on.
Into the toolkits I built guide layers that artists can turn on to make sure their type is still within brand guidelines, plus controls to adjust type tracking and overall position of the type, although those should only be needed in special cases.
Every toolkit has social sizes pre-built, so if the background elements or characters are changed in the main comp they will automatically update in all of the social sizes. The only work needed is to version the type in each comp. The comps all have guide layers showing each social network's safety guides as reference.
Captioning Toolkit
The captioning toolkit is mainly used for social/off channel purposes, but occasionally there are low-budget music videos for the block and channel that require captions and there isn't time or space to use our more bespoke Alpha Titles toolkit. When that happens, the captioning toolkit comes in very handy!
I set up this toolkit so that there is just one master comp that controls everything. Footage is dropped into that master comp and the copy is added as keyframes, timed out as needed for the piece. The Master Controller then allows you to change all of the type to a different brand color if you'd like, or you can key it to change throughout your captions if you need to.
This one master comp then automatically populates all of the social sizes so that your captions for every platform are essentially done in one go, but if you need to adjust anything on a per-aspect ratio basis that is also completely possible to do. Type and color can both be changed within the social size comps in a way that is non-destructive to the master comp.
This toolkit was made as an AE template as well as a Mogrt.
Endpage "Build" File Compositing Setup
The entire Nick Jr rebrand centers around 3D animated 'rooms', with each card designed to be it's own playroom of sorts. Initially, these were rendered as flattened one piece backgrounds with text and images added in post, which makes sense since they are essentially one cohesive world. However, in practice we often need to add, remove, or shift objects within a design on the fly in order to accommodate specific requests, and having to re-render entire 4K scenes every time something needed to be turned off or adjusted was unsustainable and expensive. My solution to this was to take every 3D file and break it up into 'layers' which I then rendered separately and composited back together as layered backgrounds in After Effects. Each element in a scene was it's own layer that, along with it's cast shadows, could be turned off without leaving weird holes or blotches behind in the scene. This made it much faster and easier to update scenes when things needed changing, and also made it much easier to make slight adjustments for social sizes and alternative formats without having to create an entirely new 3D file; I could just nudge things around in After Effects. For example, if we wanted to change a purple triangle element into a blue square, we could simply re-render that one 'layer' out of cinema and swap it into the layered AE file, rather than re-rendering and re-compositing the entire scene again.
The backgrounds are then pre-rendered as lightweight movs and those movs are used in the toolkit files, thereby making versioning deliverables quite quick and straightforward, while keeping the flexibility of the full compositing 'build' file intact.