The Voice on Snapchat: Season 4 & 5

NBC Entertainment, Marketing & Digital
Digital, Branding, Creative Direction
2018

Designing for a major brand, in a unique format, on an evolving platform.

The Emmy-nominated "The Voice on Snapchat" returned for its 4th season in Spring 2018 and 5th season in Fall 2018– in search of a designer to help create the episode tiles, senior producer Ryan Eytcheson brought me on board the Snapchat team to lend a helping hand!

Over the course of the 4th season, my tile designs were seen by an average of 2.5 million unique viewers, racking up over 210 million views.

The process:

The designs for Snapchat's Discover tiles require a unique approach to make them effective and appealing to the Snapchat audience. It's crucial that each tile stands out against a crowd of other content tiles, which all live on a small, mobile screen.

Taking our learnings from previous seasons into account, our primary design considerations for the tiles were very specific to the Snapchat platform:

Color: Are the colors bright? Do they enhance the tile's distinctiveness? Does it stay on brand?
Crop: Is the image cropped tight enough on the facial expression?
Talent: Are we featuring enough of our star talent from the show?

In addition, we had to design around the three main components of a Snapchat tile: the logo, key art, and headline (see right).

One of my priorities was to make sure the Snapchat show had a visual connection to the broadcast show. For example, the 4th season’s tiles integrated visual elements from the show's S14 on-air logo (in this case, the grill texture) as well as the show's social assets (a dot motif).

This also helped create a visual through line for the entire season's tiles.

The deliverables:

I created anywhere from 5-10 different tile options for every episode so the producers could choose the most ideal tile to go with their headlines. The 4th and 5th seasons had 9 episodes each overall.

Season 4: The audition episodes were split by coach – so the tiles were tailored specifically for Alicia Keys, Adam Levine, Kelly Clarkson, and Blake Shelton. They had a yellow/orange color, paired with the grill lines or a collage of the artists. The battle episodes had a slightly modified design that featured a dot motif, a pink & purple color matching the episodes' lighting design, and the inclusion of the two artists battling that episode. We also prominently featured Julia Michaels, the guest advisor.

Season 5: The audition episodes were also split by coach, tailored for Jennifer Hudson, Adam Levine, Kelly Clarkson, and Blake Shelton. We used the watercolor elements from the broadcast show’s S15 key art. The battle episodes borrowed a prism motif from the broadcast show’s social assets.

Throughout the seasons, we had access to A/B testing tools that allowed us to gauge the tiles' effectiveness from week to week so we could see what worked in engaging users and driving full-episode views.

Shortly after the 4th season began, Snapchat introduced a brand new ability to design "animated" tiles.

Always wanting to innovate and experiment, I jumped at the opportunity and tried a few different styles: subtle effects like a glow, animated elements like a bobbing head and moving background, and clip pulls of eye-catching moments from the episode. These were achieved with simple keyframe animations in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I also created social assets that the artists could use to promote the show on their social platforms. Some of these assets were even featured in on-air news broadcasts in the artists' hometowns!

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