Moz Whiteboard Friday

Overview

Whiteboard Friday is Moz’s long-running educational series, pairing blog content and YouTube videos with industry experts diagramming SEO topics in front of a whiteboard. The format had driven traffic and reinforced Moz’s thought leadership for years, but the thumbnails and promotional system had gone largely unchanged since 2007. As the series evolved beyond its founder-led origins, its visual identity needed to evolve with it.

The brief was to make the series feel current and more effective across today’s feeds without losing the familiar format and personality that made it recognizable.

Challenge

The core tension was familiarity versus a contemporary feel. The goals:

• Expand the color palette for more impact in social feeds
• Keep the series’ distinctive personality and playful presenter poses
• Avoid “title blindness” through custom typography

The solution retained presenters as expressive cutouts, sometimes using Photoshop to add unexpected props or illustrate an idea directly into the scene. A modified version of the classic whiteboard background preserved continuity, while expanded color and custom typography gave every topic a more distinctive, scroll-stopping entry point.

Process & deliverables

The redesign produced four rotating background templates that could flex across blog headers, YouTube thumbnails, social cards, Instagram posts and stories, plus branded and unbranded video teasers. The modular system balanced variety with a sustainable weekly production cadence.

The visual system also carried into short-form promotion, pairing the stronger episode identity with snappy motion and editing for paid and organic social placements.

Teaser concepts: Jo Cameron · Animation/editing: Elda Flores Montelongo.

Results

The refreshed system gave Whiteboard Friday a more recognizable and coherent brand across every touchpoint. Clearer, brighter thumbnails also created a better way for viewers to distinguish the subjects they were looking for at a glance, while the template system kept weekly publishing efficient.