YouTube Shorts Illustrations 2024-2025

Stakeholder: YouTube YTUX
Role: Illustrator, Embedded Contractor via ASG LLC

The YTUX team at YouTube focuses on creating product features within YouTube Shorts' mobile and desktop environments. During my time as an embedded contractor with this team, I worked alongsing product designers and engineers to create illustrations representing 1p video effects to enhance user experiences, build novelty for YouTube Shorts, and showcase new capabilities within YouTube's broser-based Effect Maker app which allows users to develop their own effects.

Over 14 months, I produced 100+ illustrations across YouTube Shorts surfaces and contributed to experiemental feature development. Stepping in as the sole illustrator serving this team as 2024 came to a close, I became the primary source of wisdom for illustration processes and worked with the team to define comprehensive style and process documentation for YouTube Shorts effect thumbnails based on past years' work, industry trends, and YouTube's brand guidelines. During this time I maintained an encompassing Figma document showcasing process work, managed deliverable file libraries, and compiled an asset and color library to ensure consistency in future illustrations.

Shorts Effect Thumbnails

These illustrations can be found within YouTube's mobile app within the Shorts camera's Effects tab. The streamlined and polished style allows users to discern between 1p and user-generated effects at a glance, improving skimability and establishing patterns between similar effects.

The rapid-pace and somewhat transient nature of effect thumbnail illustrations meant work was less beholden to brand guidelines, allowing for flexibility in composition and color. The simplified modern style was maintained and itterated upon to ensure legibility at small scale/ The priority of each piece was to highlight the content, style, or feature being showcased in its associated video effect.

While the primary style was minimal, many effects would require a more extensive style to demonstrate the effect's capabilities. I regularly found ways to simulate varied styles on quick turnarounds, utilizing the full capabilties of Adobe Illustrator to shade, texture, and render imagery within a vector format. This process was creatively challenging and pushed my vector illustration abilities to a new level, but ensured editability during feedback stages, and provided a rich library of assets for future team members to repurpose.

YouTube Effect Maker Spot Illustations

YouTube has created the YouTube Effect Maker app for verified YouTube creators to engineer their own video effects. This program offers a robust suite of capabilities that allow for extensive customization, from adding 3d light sources and models to integrating touch-based interactivity and generative tools.

These illustrations are located within Effect Maker's tools tabs, each accompanying its associated module.