A theme is a brand in one line: re-skin a whole collection
How themes and brands work in Video, what a theme sets, what always wins over it, and how to re-theme a collection when a client changes their mind.
Changing the look of one video is easy. Changing the look of forty, the day the client sends a new brand guide, is the test of a system.
What a theme sets#
A theme is a named token set: a palette, a type pair, a shape (radius, density, shadow), how things move and the scene change it prefers. Video ships seventeen, taken from real design rounds, and three brands with dark and light modes.
In a spec it is one line, look: "r7-signal". A scene can carry its own look, and a template can take the theme as a parameter.
What always wins#
An explicit brand or mode on a video wins over what a theme says. That is deliberate: a theme proposes, you decide. A video with no theme draws exactly as before.
Re-theming a collection#
Put the videos of a client in a collection. When the look changes, choose re-theme and the theme: every video is re-made with the new tokens. Anything that cannot take the change is listed with the reason. If you want to keep the old set, duplicate the collection first as a new version and re-theme the copy.
Components that follow#
Components read the tokens, so a quote card, a phone showcase and a lower third all change with the theme. That is why Video builds videos from components rather than from loose pictures: a picture cannot be re-themed.
A small discipline#
Use a theme for the look, and keep the words out of it. The less your videos have baked into pictures, the more a re-theme can do.
Designing a video so a theme can change it#
A re-theme can only change what is made of tokens. A few habits make that work:
- Use components and layers, not baked pictures. A text layer takes its colour and font from the theme; text inside a picture does not.
- Keep the logo as a layer. A logo outro that is a snippet can be swapped once and inserted everywhere.
- Do not hard-code colours unless you mean to. A hard-coded colour will stay when the theme changes. That is sometimes the point, for a brand colour that must never move, but it should be a decision.
- Check both modes. A brand has a dark and a light mode, and a video can use either. Preview both before you hand a set to a client.
Mascots#
Each brand has its own marks. The default is Gee for Geenius, Dot in Round 6, and Wunda in Wundaly. A mascot peek component brings one into a scene, and it follows the theme's colours.
What not to expect#
A theme changes the look of a video. It does not rewrite the words or rebuild a layout that does not suit the new brand. If a new brand has a very different shape, you will still edit scenes by hand. The saving is that you edit a few scenes, not forty videos.