Jacob Waites
I design, prototype, and build brands and interactions full of expressive type, fun motion, bold colors, and minimal line-work. Sometimes I write and speak about design. My craft is the way I speak to the world, I work to help others find their voice and make them successful.
House Calls
The U.S. Surgeon General's first podcast, created to help bring America together around real health stories, words and wisdom from the Surgeon General, and content from experts.
During my time at the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General, I led an effort for creating a brand and visual language for the office's first-ever podcast series. The series is now out on Spotify for streaming.
The Animation
During the end of the project and close to the launch of the podcast, I created a series of MOGRTs in After Effects that powered an animated trailer with a voice-over from Vivek. These templates allowed designers and videographers to easily adjust the timing and composition of the flow of the animation at will for easier collaboration between my process and theirs.
The Brand
I worked through a brand direction inspired by historical elements from Vivek's past experiences as Surgeon General, turning them into collage elements juxtaposed with bright color and explosive-type treatments. The end result evokes new hope for the SG's legacy.
Podcast Cover Tool
I created a Figma tool for generating podcast covers and a separate template for podcast title cards and key images, these tools and templates help to make it easy for the design team to maintain and create new content for the series. The tool uses variants and component properties to help you compose an entire podcast cover unique to the episode's content by uploading a single image and editing a content field. The images below show only a fraction of the components that power the tool. This is only meant to act as a base for designers to start from but provides a great jumping-off point for new compositions and ideas.
The series title cards used the extruded containers in larger forms to create bold moments for introducing the host and guests for each episode.
