Ben's Video Rentals

Gaming channels compete in a feed of near-identical thumbnails. I wanted a brand you could recognise at a glance, and one with a story behind it. So the channel is a video rental shop: every video is a tape on the shelf, and every game is a new release.

That one idea runs through everything. A neon shop sign is the logo, the banner and end screen are set inside the store, and the thumbnails are framed like display cases.

With a new upload most weeks, every thumbnail had to be fast to make and still read as part of a set. So I treated them as a system with a few fixed parts: a neon purple frame that glows against YouTube's dark UI, the glossy orange "B" stamped bottom-left, and the game's logo as the title.

The legendary-fish series in Red Dead Redemption 2 shows it at its best. Every episode adds a red-framed inset of that video's catch, like a trophy photo pinned to the wall. The layout is fixed, so the only thing that changes is the fish. Viewers can tell each episode apart at a glance, and the whole run reads as one collection.