States of Mind is a weekly politics podcast by the RTÉ News foreign desk presented by Brian O’Donovan and Jackie Fox. It covers political events in the United States of America. The first series focused on the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election.
I developed the brand direction around a grid of equally spaced white stars. This grid is the basis for all brand applications and allows the flexibility to easily apply the brand to a variety of different aspect ratios.
Square, 16:9 and 9:16 variants of the podcast cover for use on different platforms.
The palette uses strong colours based on the two main US political parties as well as a purple-tinted grey, black and white.
The fonts used for the logotype and secondary messaging are both angled display fonts. The logotype works with the grid of stars, each character replacing a star position in the grid. When secondary type appears within the grid of stars, it is kerned to fit the width of the closest whole number of stars.
Branded promotional series and episodic imagery can easily be created for RTÉ and social platforms. Photographic images are treated with a vibrant gradient map and guests and subjects are cut out and transposed against the grid of stars. The background colour can be alternated, but the blue background is always used when the wordmark is present.
Various printed assets were designed for use promoting the podcast and live podcast recording events.
Simple motion graphic templates were developed animating the logotype and other brand elements. These can be used to make social posts or on-screen backdrops for live podcast events.