Jacob Waites
🖼️
Jacob Waites

House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy Podcast

During my time at the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General, I led an effort for creating a brand and visual language for the office's first-ever podcast series. The series is now out on Spotify for streaming.

The Animation

During the end of the project and close to the launch of the podcast, I created a series of MOGRTs in After Effects that powered an animated trailer with a voice-over from Vivek. These templates allowed designers and videographers to easily adjust the timing and composition of the flow of the animation at will for easier collaboration between my process and theirs.

The Brand

I worked through a brand direction inspired by historical elements from Vivek's past experiences as Surgeon General, turning them into collage elements juxtaposed with bright color and explosive-type treatments. The end result evokes new hope for the SG's legacy.

The brand system includes a badge and multiple workmarks in an expanding extruded container that allows for flexibility in size in differenct placements and animations.
The podcast covers are generated using a custom Figma tool, see below for more details
I explored a custom build for a standalone site before we re-focused our efforts for integrating the content into the existing SG platform web structures, but this allowed us to design brand expressions and placements in a more exploratory space.
My favorite elements from this brand are the type expressions, giving a feeling of movement in static forms and illustrating meaning without the need for shape.

Podcast Cover Tool

I created a Figma tool for generating podcast covers and a separate template for podcast title cards and key images, these tools and templates help to make it easy for the design team to maintain and create new content for the series. The tool uses variants and component properties to help you compose an entire podcast cover unique to the episode's content by uploading a single image and editing a content field. The images below show only a fraction of the components that power the tool. This is only meant to act as a base for designers to start from but provides a great jumping-off point for new compositions and ideas.

The main configurator instructions.
A fraction of the variant options of the template.
A view of using an instance of a cover component.

The series title cards used the extruded containers in larger forms to create bold moments for introducing the host and guests for each episode.

Send Jacob Waites a reply about this page
More from Jacob Waites
Back to profile