Mihir Lele's profile

YouTube One Nation

YouTube ONE NATION
​Art Direction | Identity Design | Winning Pitch
Client
YouTube India
Live Team
Raashi Sanghvi
Manish Chandnani
Dharam Saraviya
Visual Design Lead
Mihir Lele
Marketing Head
Divya Ramesh
Post Production Head
Shweta Chavan
Online Editor
Kshitij Verma (Doozyworks)
Social Media Design Team
Samia Kapadia
Shivani Mankad
Simran Khurana
Griva Jain
Rushin Banerjee
Brief
I was approached by Only Much Louder (OML) to pitch for the identity design of a show that they were putting together, in partnership with YouTube India.
The 11+ hours live stream show, called ONE NATION, premiered on the 30th of April 2020 on YouTube and featured India's biggest YouTubers and artists, who came together to entertain the nation and raise funds for the fight against COVID-19. 
The show was put together in 7 days and all the artists and production crew members, including me, worked on this show remotely from their homes, during a worldwide lockdown. 
My Role
I was asked to pitch for the design and overall visual communication of 'One Nation' within 2 working days. If selected, the design would go on to become the visual identity of the show and I would be its Design Lead.
Design Pitch
I put together the following deck as my pitch for the show's identity design.

The pitch was selected from several others, and I was asked to create a usage guidelines for the logo along with some design templates for the marketing of the show.
Logo Usage Guidelines
Once refined, stripped down to the bare essentials and colors tweaked, while still retaining the core thought behind it, the final logo unit was locked. Next, I created its usage guidelines.
Design Templates for Social Media
Since there were multiple artists and performers; some performing individually , some in group or two or more, templates were created keeping the variable nature of the show in mind.
Since the show was put together on a very short notice, a large portion of the work included creating individual marketing promotional posts for over 80+ artists. A small design team had to adapt the designs for all individual artists in a short span of time. The design template, hence, had to be easily adaptable. We decided to change the templates from the ones I had suggested in the pitch deck since those would've required more time to adapt for all artists, and we needed a quicker turn-around time on these posts.
The templates below were designed to accommodate as many artists and as many layouts as required. It had enough scope for be play around with, design wise, and the template allowed for faster adaptability and post creation which was one of the most important factors owing to the deadlines. (Click on the page below to go to full screen mode)
The above designs had to be modified.
YouTube had a pre existing design property, called "Stay Home" that they decided to merge the show with. Hence, the design and its collaterals had to be tweaked and aesthetically paired with the Stay Home design language. 
The New logo
A version of the existing design concept was created with the "Stay Home" design aesthetics and collaterals such as the opening sequence and social media templates were created, that looked more in tune with the new design.
Social Media Templates
The original social media templates were tweaked to make them more in tune with the new logo design aesthetics. They were also adapted to YouTube headers and Instagram Stories.
Opening Sequence
I created the opening sequence for the show, that was used as a trailer for the show announcement as well. can be seen here: Trailer
The elements were passed on as a design elements and style treatment frames to the animators/ online editors who were designed the other video collaterals used in the live show.
Overview
This show was a great learning experience for me in the way that I got to lead the design team at such a massive scale. Apart from shouldering the responsibility of art directing animations, marketing posts and live show graphics, I was also an active part of the planning and discussions that took place when so many departments and people came together remotely, to put up a show on this nature on such a tight deadline.
Watch the full show here:
YouTube One Nation
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