Essence Magazine x Jergens
Overview
What We Did
The Outcome
Design motion graphics for a beauty and skincare video that had to honor a brand, a product launch, and an editorial platform — simultaneously
“Reveal Your Glow” wasn’t a generic sponsored segment. Produced through Citi Unlimited for Essence, it was a genuine product launch moment for Jergens’ Melanin Glow Illuminating Moisturizer — featuring Beauty Reporter Darian Symoné Harvin in conversation with Board-Certified Dermatologist and Jergens Glow Collective member Dr. Angela J. Lamb. The video had credibility built into its talent. The motion graphics had to match that without undercutting either the editorial tone or the product’s marketing objectives.
Overview
“Reveal Your Glow” wasn’t a generic sponsored segment. Produced through Citi Unlimited for Essence, it was a genuine product launch moment for Jergens’ Melanin Glow Illuminating Moisturizer — featuring Beauty Reporter Darian Symoné Harvin in conversation with Board-Certified Dermatologist and Jergens Glow Collective member Dr. Angela J. Lamb. The video had credibility built into its talent. The motion graphics had to match that without undercutting either the editorial tone or the product’s marketing objectives.
What We Did
Working with Citi Unlimited and Essence, we designed and animated the complete graphics suite: title cards, lower thirds, and transition bumpers across three video segments. Every asset was built in After Effects and delivered within Jergens’ brand system.
The Outcome
The easiest response to strict brand compliance is to treat it as a checklist and move on. We don’t do that. Every constrained brief is still an opportunity to make something that has a point of view within its limits — type that has weight, transitions that have rhythm, lower thirds that feel considered rather than templated. Jergens is proof that Therum can operate inside a brand system, serve a media partner’s editorial standards, and still deliver motion work that elevates the production rather than just completing it.
Motion design and typographic development for the full video package
Working with Citi Unlimited and Essence, we designed and animated the complete graphics suite: title cards, lower thirds, and transition bumpers across three video segments. Every asset was built in After Effects and delivered within Jergens’ brand system.
Brand compliance as a creative constraint, not a ceiling
Jergens operates with a specific and well-defined visual identity — particular about color, typography, and the way its products are presented on screen. That’s not unusual for a consumer packaged goods brand. What is unusual is being asked to make those constraints feel expressive rather than limiting in a video context designed for Essence’s audience.
The Melanin Glow line has its own visual register — warm, luminous, melanin-rich in its color story. We worked within Jergens’ brand guidelines while pulling from the product’s specific palette to inform the motion energy: vibrant backgrounds, large-scale type, and transition cards that kept the featured products front and center. The goal wasn’t to decorate the video — it was to give each segment a visual identity strong enough to orient the viewer instantly, and smooth enough to disappear once it had done its job.
Lower thirds were designed in direct response to the title card direction, so the full package read as a system rather than a collection of individual assets. Consistency across all three video segments was non-negotiable — the same talent, the same brand, three separate pieces of content that needed to feel like one cohesive production.
A complete, brand-compliant motion graphics package across three video segments
Title cards, lower thirds, and transition bumpers — all built to Jergens’ brand guidelines, designed around the Melanin Glow product line’s visual language, and delivered as a reusable asset system flexible enough to carry future campaigns. Every font choice, every color decision, every layout was made with both the brand system and Essence’s editorial audience in mind.
A polished production that landed on Essence.com with the visual credibility to match its talent
The finished video presented Dr. Lamb’s expertise and the product’s launch moment with the clarity and warmth the campaign called for. Graphics that served the conversation without stepping over it — which, in a beauty editorial context, is precisely the right result.
Working within guidelines is still design work
The easiest response to strict brand compliance is to treat it as a checklist and move on. We don’t do that. Every constrained brief is still an opportunity to make something that has a point of view within its limits — type that has weight, transitions that have rhythm, lower thirds that feel considered rather than templated. Jergens is proof that Therum can operate inside a brand system, serve a media partner’s editorial standards, and still deliver motion work that elevates the production rather than just completing it.