Creatorverse Key Art for Safiya Nygaard
Key art development for creator-led entertainment distributed across Tubi, Roku, Prime Video, and other streaming platforms.
Above: Safiya Nygaard's YouTube channel
Overview
Night Media represents some of the internet’s most influential creators, artists, and entrepreneurs, helping extend their content and brands across new platforms and audiences. As creator-led entertainment expands beyond social media, Tubi’s Creatorverse brings digital-native creators and their programming into a dedicated streaming destination.
Night was looking for key art that would elevate the existing brand(s) of their client(s) and translate well across streamers. For this project, I led key art development from initial discovery and visual research through concept development, art direction, composition, and final design. Each direction was developed to translate an existing identity into a compelling entertainment visual, establishing a clear concept and flexible design system that could scale across streaming platforms, formats, and placements.
Key art for each creator would be distributed and used across major streaming platforms including Tubi, Roku, Prime Video, Amazon Fire TV, Pluto TV, LG Channels, and Samsung TV Plus.
Safiya Nygaard
Designing key art for Safiya's streaming content was my first project with Night, but I'd been following her long before she'd left BuzzFeed to create her own viral content. From staying at the world's largest hotel to building an at-home spa with Temu products, Safiya's docu-style vlog content has attracted more than 10M YouTube subscribers. Known for investigating internet trends and quirky experiments, I was immediately inspired by Safiya's curiosity; however, that also introduced a challenge: How do I represent someone who's involved in nearly every topic on the internet?
Before collecting inspiration, I reviewed some of Safiya's most recent trending content to learn about what was resonating with her audience. While beauty is popular with subscribers, they're also drawn to her food and travel videos and continue to align with her "Bat Bitch" style. I sourced inspiration from Safiya's editing style on YouTube, paper textures, movie posters, and witchy elements from her personal style.
Above: Moodboard for Safiya Nygaard
Design Concepts
After collecting inspiration from every corner of Safiya's internet, I was ready to explore concepts. With no official logo or wordmark, I started with type treatments. I wanted something modern and a little quirky, but mature enough to represent her brand on serious streamers. Because her name was the only text allowed on the show artwork, I wanted it to be a focal point and help communicate what Safiya's streaming content was about. I found serif fonts that would nod to her personal style and rounded fonts that would reference her DIY content. I shared three complete concepts with Safiya's team.
Above: Type treatments considered for Safiya's wordmark
Above: Three concepts were presented to Safiya's team
Concept 1
Leaning into Safiya's witchy aesthetic, I surrounded her with floating imagery of her main content pillars and featured her cat, Crusty. I added a diecut effect in Photoshop and used a media brush to draw the chalky outline around her. I created magic sparks in Illustrator to layer around her and finished the piece with a textured purple background. I used the yellow color from her sweater as an accent color to tie in the supporting elements and the painting behind her name.
Concept 2
Safiya is known for her Frankenstein videos, which arguably began when she melted all of her lipsticks together. I imagined what a page from her notebook might look like scattered with tiny sketches of her experiments. Filling white space with graph paper, I added organic doodles to represent her beauty experiments and travel content.
Concept 3
Safiya has spent several years creating video content, and representing all that she's done proved to be a challenge. I found math and science textbook covers particularly helpful when exploring ways to represent imagery for the artwork. What if Safiya wrote a textbook about all of her interests? She'd obviously have her name spelled out in a font straight out of a spellbook. Crusty, her cat, would be by her side under a moonlit sky. The remaining panels on either side acted as windows into her beauty and travel lifestyles. Safiya is centered in front of a panel with a celestial pattern that frames the crown of her head.
Adjustments
Safiya liked Concepts 1 and 3 with a few adjustments. I was asked to use the font from the third concept for both of them, make the background purple, and replace the cat in both with a bat. I edited the fonts and repainted the light coloring around her name.
While both options were strong, I felt that Design 1 was the most elevated and would perform best on streaming platforms.
Above: Final key art designs shown to Safiya
Above: Official key art for Safiya Nygaard on Tubi's Creatorverse
Final Key Art
After reviewing both finished designs, Safiya chose Design 2. I designed a vertical poster version and a landscape format for streaming specs across major streamers. Also delivered her official wordmark in horizontal and stacked lockups so it could appear as the title treatment for her show and in the channel guide.
Above: Safiya Nygaard's official key art and wordmark shown on Tubi, Prime Video, and RokuTV.
Credits
Agency: Night
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