D25 Toolkits
Building Once for Thirty Stations
The Situation
When Hearst Television's D25 initiative rolled out, it brought a fundamental shift in how branding animation would be produced. Motion work was moving away from a centralized design hub and into the hands of local stations — meaning over 30 television stations would need professional, on-brand animation toolkits, and most of the editors using them wouldn't be motion designers. The tools had to work for everyone, from a seasoned After Effects artist who wanted to dig into the architecture, to an editor who just needed to swap a logo and hit render.
Building individually versioned toolkits for every station wasn't sustainable. A new system had to be invented from scratch.
The Task
I was responsible for designing and building that system — establishing not just the first toolkits, but the organizational structure, the common language, and the production standards every future toolkit would be built on. Whatever I built first would become the blueprint.
The Work
I started with our beta station, chosen specifically because I knew they'd give honest workflow and functionality feedback. Building with their logo in place let me establish the structural logic and naming conventions that would carry forward across the entire system.
The central problem was scale. Versioning individual toolkits for every market indefinitely wasn't an option. The solution was a single animation standard that all logos could be built to, paired with a market-organized logo library on our DAM. Toolkits ship with a proxy logo — end users pull the logo they need and drop it into a designated precomp. Combined with other localization features inside clearly labeled EDIT precomps, a station can fully customize a toolkit in minutes.
Before anything shipped, I stress-tested everything myself — versioning, timing, edge cases that only surface under real production conditions. I also retrofitted toolkits built by other designers to bring them in line with the new standard, so the whole ecosystem functioned consistently while we trained the broader team. And because I wanted the system to grow with its users rather than cap out, I built in room to introduce Master Properties and EGP controls incrementally — features end users are now discovering on their own as their confidence builds.
The Outcome
HTV Design now builds fewer toolkits, but better ones — with the bandwidth to anticipate needs rather than just react to them. Stations have access to a wide range of agnostic, customizable toolkits they can adapt quickly for different stories and brands, regardless of their After Effects experience level. The stress testing paid off in the most meaningful way: toolkit update failures have effectively stopped being a reported issue since launch.
Like a software product in active development, these toolkits are continuously versioned. New layouts, new features, and new capabilities get folded back into existing work as needs evolve and branding grows. The goal was never to ship and move on — it was to build something that gets smarter over time.