A long-running creative podcast on the Sketchbook Skool Youtube channel, the creator of the podcast and founder of Sketchbook Skool was looking for a fresh take on the current style for season 5 of the "Art for All" podcast.
I began by taking a look at other podcast channels' thumbnails and sketching out the basic shapes and how the space was distributed.
I then took those concepts and sketched out the ideas to fit what Sketchbook Skool needed in their thumbnails.
The sketches led to the exploration of many ideas as seen below, such as using the co-hosts' headshots, screenshots from the episode, quotes from the episode, stock images, and the title of the podcast. Different colors were also taken into account.
After many drafts, the thumbnail to the left was the final contender. However, the headshots still didn't feel like they were doing enough to contribute to the clickability of the thumbnail. Thus, further exploration began.
The "gimmick" of the season became the "Help!" motif, so this was added to the thumbnail to reinforce the episode title even further, while also playing around with using appropriate stock images that reflected the episode theme of the week.
Below are the final podcast thumbnails that made it onto the channel for the four episodes that aired this season. They ended up being modular to adapt different lengths of episode titles, colors, and image dimensions, while still having the same feel and identity.
You can view the final episodes on Youtube here.
Additionally, all of the podcast episodes can be found on platforms such as Spotify and other streaming platforms, and an update was needed for the image icon on those platforms. Below is an exploration of ideas, ranging from simple text to including the headshots from earlier drafts.
The final image selected, as seen on Spotify.