NHL Stenden · motion design · brand-led series system

The brief was small. The outcome wasn't. NHL Stenden ran a YouTube "study with me" series for students, focused study sessions split into timed blocks with breaks in between, the lengths varying from video to video. The series already existed, my task was one thing: an animated break screen for a single video. The original break just cut back to reused footage — functional, but cheap. It needed to feel like a moment, not a gap.

The real challenge was freedom inside a brand guide. How do you make a break feel exciting and alive while staying completely on-brand? My answer was to build from what the brand already owned. The identity included a set of base shapes — so instead of adding foreign elements, I animated those, combining the brand's colors and motion into a transition that felt fresh but unmistakably theirs. The energy came from the system, not around it.

I designed the break around how the student feels. The goal was a specific emotion: you made it through — now you get to breathe. In the final seconds of each study block, a sharp 3-2-1 countdown builds that last push — the "almost there" rush right before the break hits. Then the break itself softens into gentle, continuous motion: alive and calm, never a static timer, never overwhelming. Tension into release.

One add-on became the template. The concept worked so well it was rolled out across the entire series — every transition, every break built the same way. A single-video enhancement turned into the series' consistent visual language.