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[DIGITAL DESIGN]

Ads, Videos and Hundreds of Tiny Thumbnails

Video ads, paid display campaigns and a template thumbnail redesign for Lucid.

A set of Lucid display ads in orange, charcoal and purple, each showing a smiling man at his desk next to a diagram, with the line “Kick back and let your data update your diagrams.”

Some of my favorite projects are big launches. Some are small rectangles that show up in your LinkedIn feed. This post is about the rectangles.

Video ads

From storyboards to working with motion designers and content writers, video ads have become one of my favorite ways to tell a story. A good one has to land the idea before someone scrolls past, so every frame needs a job.

A still from a Lucid video ad: a Lucid canvas titled “Make it real” with a flowchart of blue and pink shapes and collaborator cursors labeled ST and JE.
“Make it real,” 2:23.
A still from a Lucid video ad called “The game of Agile”: a board-game wheel with icons for each Agile step and a track from Start to End, with collaborator avatars on a blue background.
“The game of Agile,” 0:33.

Display ads

B2B marketing runs on paid media, and paid media runs on sets. One idea has to work as a skinny skyscraper, a wide leaderboard, a square and a LinkedIn post, without falling apart at any of them.

A set of Lucid display ads in light gray and blue announcing “Lucid is now FedRAMP Authorized,” in leaderboard, rectangle, skyscraper and half-page sizes, each with a small diagram and a Learn more button.
The FedRAMP launch set.

The FedRAMP set had a simple job: tell government buyers Lucid was now authorized. The headline does all the talking, and a small diagram with collaborator avatars keeps it from feeling like a press release. I made a dark version too, for placements where light ads would disappear.

The same FedRAMP ad set in charcoal with bright blue accents, a yellow warning icon and a flowchart running through each size.

The growth campaigns could be more playful. Each set pairs a real person with a piece of the product, and the line stays short enough to read at a glance.

A set of Lucid display ads in red, charcoal and purple, each showing a smiling woman on a video call next to a timeline diagram, with the line “Un-boring your next virtual meeting.”
A LinkedIn ad reading “Virtual whiteboarding and intelligent diagramming in one secure platform,” with an isometric collaboration canvas, sticky notes and lock icons.
A LinkedIn ad with a black-and-white photo of a man at a laptop, a diagram and a shield icon, and the line “Virtual whiteboarding and intelligent diagramming in one secure platform.”

Template thumbnail redesign

For years, Lucid’s template thumbnails were straight screenshots of the templates. At thumbnail size, that meant a gallery full of tiny, cluttered, unreadable diagrams.

I redesigned the thumbnails for our most popular templates and gave art direction for hundreds more. Each one boils its template down to the shape you’d recognize: a few boxes for an org chart, colored columns for a backlog, bars for a Gantt chart. They share one palette and one line weight, so the whole gallery reads as a set.

A grid of 18 redesigned Lucid template thumbnails, including flowchart, mind map, business model canvas, sequence diagram, org chart, roadmap, Gantt chart and backlog planning, each a simple illustration in blue, pink, purple and yellow.
The Lucid template picker with the Agile category open, showing the new thumbnails on cards for Big room planning, Backlog estimation, Sprint planning, Sprint backlog refinement and Sprint estimation.
The new thumbnails in Lucid’s template picker.

Small work, big reach: these are some of the first things people see when they start something new in Lucid.