Danielle Leslie runs two distinct brands that share an audience but carry different visual identities — Course From Scratch, her flagship course creation program, and SINCE3000, her broader entrepreneurship and knowledge-sharing brand. When her video thumbnails across both weren't performing at the level her content deserved, she brought COURSE in to redesign them with the same strategic and visual discipline applied to her ad creative work. The goal was consistent across both brands: thumbnails that stopped the scroll, communicated the value of the content clearly, and drove viewers to click.
The engagement started with thorough brand research and analysis for both Course From Scratch and SINCE3000 — studying Danielle's existing design language, audience expectations, and brand messaging for each to understand where they overlapped and where they needed to diverge. Danielle's brands shared an energy — vibrant, empowering, entrepreneurial — but each carried its own visual character, and the thumbnail systems COURSE built had to honor both while maintaining enough consistency that a viewer who followed her across platforms recognized her content instantly.
Each video was reviewed individually to identify the core themes, key takeaways, and visual elements most worth featuring in the thumbnail — ensuring that what viewers saw before clicking accurately represented what they would find inside. That accuracy matters for watch time and completion rates as much as it does for click-through rates, because a thumbnail that overpromises creates viewers who leave disappointed and don't come back.
Graphic design execution applied bold typography emphasizing the key topic of each video, vibrant on-brand colors consistent with Danielle's palette across both brands, custom graphic elements and icons adding visual interest without cluttering the composition, and clean layouts optimized for readability at the sizes YouTube and other platforms actually rendered them. Multiple design iterations were developed and refined through close collaboration with Danielle — each round of feedback sharpening the thumbnails until they reflected exactly how she wanted her content to show up to her audience.
The finished thumbnail systems drove measurable improvements in click-through rates across both Course From Scratch and SINCE3000, created the brand consistency her content library had been missing, and received strong positive feedback from an audience that — given the entrepreneurial, visually literate profile of Danielle's following — knew exactly what good design looked like.
Services Delivered
- Brand research and visual identity analysis for two distinct brands
- Video content review and key theme identification
- Creative concept development for each thumbnail
- Bold typography and on-brand color system design
- Custom graphic elements and icon design
- Clean layout optimization for readability and platform rendering
- Iterative design refinement with client feedback
- Cohesive visual identity system across Course From Scratch and SINCE3000
