Culture & Trends
on YouTube

An Experiential Website Made with YouTube

A Year of Influential Moments

After a monumental year, in which so much of our daily lives shifted to watching videos online, YouTube’s Culture & Trends team wanted to do more than just publish their annual Trends Report, they wanted to bring it to life. Their goal? To highlight notable 2020 trends on YouTube in a powerful and engaging way for an audience of influencers, advertisers, and policy makers around the globe.

Designing for Content

This was our fifth consecutive year helping YouTube celebrate the trends and culture of their platform, so we understood the challenge ahead was rooted in finding a playful way to sort and navigate a huge volume of video content.

We proposed a navigation scheme that leaned into YouTube's video-centric design, where content and transitions revolved around a rectangular video window. Paired with a hand-drawn art style, the overall concept was intended to visualize the spirit of "creativity in video."

Notably, this project marked the first time we used iPads during full-scale production. While the UX was designed in Adobe XD, all of the dev and illustration was accomplished in Procreate, then seamlessly handed off to the motion team who translated them into Lottie animations.

With UX established in Adobe XD, the design team turned to Procreate on iPad to develop a hand-crafted look and feel.

To distill 2020's videos into a simple, easy-to-understand experience, we reviewed thousands of videos, cleared hundreds of clips, and fact-checked dozens of claims.