If you haven’t been watching The Brain Scoop on YouTube, you are seriously missing out. This channel, which stars Emily Graslie and is produced by Michael Aranda, is all about the collection of skulls and taxidermied animals in the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum on the University of Montana campus. I was asked to do some designs for the series, and you can check out what I came up with after the jump!
When I was putting together the channel design, I wanted to make something that was kind of cute to contrast with all of the dead animals, just like Emily in the video. I went with an argyle-ish pattern of diagonal dashed lines with overlaid silhouettes of an animal skull. Michael wanted to keep the typography pretty simple, so I kept it to Bebas, but brought in a bright orange shadow to liven it up a bit. It’s also simple enough that we’ll be able to transfer it over to the new YouTube channel layouts pretty easily, so keep an eye out for that in the next month or so!
I couldn’t get a bigger screenshot of the Tumblr background because the skulls and the lines in the background actually scroll at different speeds, which makes a really cool effect. Many thanks to Andy Friel for helping to code it, and make sure you’re following the Tumblr right here!
Michael also asked me to design an intro screen for the more graphic videos, called the Grossometer. Above you can see the graphic I designed and then the animation done by Michael that really brings it to life (be warned that the video does involve a wolf being cut open so it’s not for people with weak stomachs).
If you find biology or animal studies the least bit interesting, make sure you go subscribe to The Brain Scoop! I’m really excited to see where this channel goes and I really hope I get to meet Emily at some point (perhaps VidCon?). Thanks so much for reading!
