This project represents a channel-wide redesign of Hillsdale College’s YouTube visual system, with The Story of America serving as a flagship application of a new thumbnail and performance standard. The series is produced and filmed by Hillsdale College in collaboration with the White House Salute to America 250 Task Force and distributed both through Hillsdale’s own channels and through the White House’s high-follower platforms as part of the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Hillsdale’s YouTube content occupies a distinctive space: academically serious, long-form, and often featuring scholars and institutional leaders speaking directly to camera. While this posture reinforces credibility, it presents a clear challenge in contemporary digital environments where thumbnails function as the primary point of entry and must perform at extremely small sizes, most often on mobile devices and for an aging audience that values clarity over visual novelty.
Prior to this work, Hillsdale’s YouTube thumbnails were designed in isolation by a mix of designers and producers, often as a secondary task within the video-making process. While well intentioned, this resulted in a disjointed visual landscape across the channel: inconsistent typography, uneven hierarchy, and competing visual conventions from one video to the next. In many cases, the designs were also text-heavy, attempting to carry too much information at once, with type that became illegible on mobile applications.
The lack of a shared system meant that viewers encountered Hillsdale content without a consistent visual signal of authorship or authority. Dense layouts and small type increased cognitive load, reduced accessibility—particularly for older viewers—and weakened the channel’s overall coherence despite the strength of the content itself.
My role was to bring consistency, cleanliness, and editorial discipline to Hillsdale’s YouTube presence while still allowing for variety across subjects and speakers. I established a flexible thumbnail system that could be adopted channel-wide, giving producers clear visual rules without forcing every video into a rigid template. The Story of America became the proving ground for this approach, given its fixed filming environment, formal tone, and high-profile distribution alongside White House content.
The system emphasized typographic restraint, clear hierarchy, and intentional cropping. Titles were treated as editorial headlines rather than informational blocks, set large enough to read instantly at small sizes and composed to feel authoritative rather than promotional. Portraits were framed to convey presence and intellectual weight, avoiding exaggerated expressions or visual effects that would undermine trust. Color, contrast, and spacing were carefully controlled so each thumbnail could compete in a dense feed while still reading as part of a coherent Hillsdale visual language.
Because the same Hillsdale-produced videos were posted both on Hillsdale’s channel and on White House platforms, performance differences became a direct reflection of thumbnail clarity rather than distribution reach. In some instances, Hillsdale’s thumbnails outperformed White House posts featuring the identical video content, despite the White House’s significantly larger follower base. The advantage came from legibility, hierarchy, and an understanding of how audiences actually encounter content in modern feeds.
This work also represents an active collaboration with Hillsdale’s Product Marketing team to continuously improve YouTube performance across both new and existing content. In addition to designing thumbnails for new releases, we actively review and A/B test revised thumbnails on older videos, using performance data to refine hierarchy, cropping, and typographic emphasis over time.
Rather than treating thumbnails as static deliverables, this process treats them as part of a living system—one that evolves in response to audience behavior while maintaining a consistent institutional voice. The collaboration allows Hillsdale to raise the performance of its existing video library while ensuring that new content launches with a clear, tested visual standard.
This ongoing partnership reinforces my approach to institutional design: working cross-functionally, setting durable visual rules, and using measured experimentation to improve clarity and accessibility without eroding brand integrity. The result is a YouTube channel that grows more coherent and effective over time, supporting Hillsdale College’s long-term educational mission and digital presence.
Thumbnail for the Birth of the Army (Story of America Series), presented by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
Thumbnail for the Continental Soldier (Story of America Series) presented by Michael Knowles
