Dan Lerner

These logos were made for the launch of the YouTube channel, “The Food Theorists”, and the GTLive segment, “GTeaLive”. Making these was all about working to keep them within the style of the other Theorist channels while figuring out the best symbol to create that would represent the channel’s content in a clear and compelling way.

Each of the channel banners shown here were made for the four respective Theorist channels on YouTube to best represent the spirit of each channel at a glance. It was important to make them distinct enough to show personality, but similar enough to tie them all together under one property.

When a thumbnail is referencing animation, I often recreate and redraw elements of the characters to suit my needs. For example, completely redoing the face on Pikachu and adding the various wounds, creating a starving Minecraft Steve almost completely from scratch, or showing exposed wires and scratches on a broken Megaman. I try to focus on the style of the character I’m changing to make sure the new elements fit naturally on them.

The key to these is often to grab attention with shocking imagery. Sometimes that’s knowing where in a film or game to find the best moments, but more often it’s changing existing assets into much scarier iterations. I do this by frankensteining bits the best bits from different places or creating my own parts when they don’t exist.

The focus with food thumbnails is on creating a desirable image that attracts the audience. This is all about making the food look as appetizing and interesting as possible, as well as keeping it realistic and knowing not to go too far with the photo manipulation.

The key to grabbing attention for film and TV is taking note of the most identifiable characters for each franchise. People need to understand who and what they’re looking at from the moment they see the image.