STORYMEDIA

Standing in front of a sky-blue photo wall, an ordinary young man – flannel shirt, floppy hair, skate shoes, and tattered jeans – speaks from his heart into his phone’s video camera. “Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for this. I’ve been hurting for a while, and I haven’t told anybody. But tonight, when they sang, ‘You will be found,’ I just . . . lost it. I felt seen for the first time. I felt like somebody knew what I was going through, and somebody cared. You’ve gotta see this show, guys.”

Within moments, the young man’s authentic, real life video review will be wrapped with video branding from the show he just witnessed -- Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen – and shared on his social feeds, giving his friends and family a real-life taste of what he just saw and felt. In that environment, his video will become the most powerful and trustworthy brand-related content possible, and Dear Evan Hansen will experience what can happen when a brand gets an authentic human face. The mobile engine that made the whole thing possible? An app called StoryMedia. How did the project get designed and brought to market? That’s where WB Creative comes in.

StoryMedia, a sister company to WB, engaged the WB team to help them bring their app idea to life. The concept was revolutionary: merge customer-created video content with brand-created video content in order to deliver a single piece of shareable media that is both authentically human and on brand. Based on their research about the value and conversion of user generated content, the StoryMedia team was convinced they had a strong value proposition on their hands.

WB worked with its branding partners, Salt Lake City’s The Design Farm, to explore the StoryMedia brand and bring forward concepts for logos, typefaces, and other brand assets. Early explorations focused on pairing the idea of digital video creation with imagery that evoked stories and books. However, as development continued, it became clear that the key idea of StoryMedia was not so much about traditional stories but about various unique bits of media coming together to create one beautiful whole. In response, the final StoryMedia logo incorporates nearly 100 small boxes of various colors and opacities to create a media Play button. The edges of the button are not quite finished, contributing to a sense of motion and in-the-moment creation. The StoryMedia team was thrilled with the design and began incorporating the brand assets across their work.

With brand assets in hand, WB moved immediately into UX/UI design mode, initially delivering a complex workflow that would accomplish the long list of StoryMedia’s desired functions. Over time, core functionality for the app was tested and streamlined, and app designs were pared down to a simple, attractive, easy-to-use interface that delivers shareable, branded, user-created videos in as little as about ten clicks.