Cool School is an award-winning children’s brand with 2 billion YouTube views, a read-along app, books, and integrations with brands like Sesame Street and Curious George.
I co-created it at Driver Studios in 2011, and singlehandedly edited, illustrated, and animated early weekly episodes myself. By the time I left in 2022, I was writing scripts and planning pre-production, co-directing live action shoots in front of a green screen, and managing an international post-production team of editors and animators to produce multiple episodes every week. I also provided a large number of voices for characters, including a shark, a witch, at least 4 different dinosaurs, Little Red Riding Hood’s Grandma, and more.
Product case study: Character redesign
As the show grew, we worked to improve production values in order to compete with other high-end and more established children’s properties. We had recurring characters that appeared on the show for years and were beloved by kids, so any redesign would be a risk. Still, if we did it right, the benefits would outweigh the risk. We decided to start with our popular superhero character, Drew Pendous, who had appeared on dozens of episodes and would hopefully soon be featured in graphic novels.
Goal: Redesign Drew Pendous to be more appealing to our child audience, and appear higher-end to parents and our adult viewers.
Measurable impact:
Higher click-through rate on thumbnails featuring the new character design
Higher viewer retention in episodes featuring the new character design
More marketing opportunities featuring the new character in books, action figures, and merchandise
Greater viewer engagement through fan art and focus groups
Concept art
Our first mission was to identify elements of Drew Pendous that were already recognizable and loved by our fans, which we would want to carry over to an updated design. This would be Drew’s general costume (cape, boots, gloves, and mask), his color scheme, and his floppy hairstyle.
After this, we worked on new concept art by myself and other illustrators. We knew that we wanted to achieve a more recognizable silhouette for branding purposes; needed a more expressive face and exaggerated body posing for better animation, graphic novels, and 3D merchandising like action figures; and also wanted to explore ways to expand the age of our target audience.
The new concept art pushes these directions to various extremes, including a much more kid-friendly version, a wackier version that might be more appealing to older audiences, and 3D models to explore how the character might appear in a different animation style altogether. We did animation tests with these new styles to see them in motion, did focus testing with actual children to see what they responded to, and discussed balancing their appeal with the cost of working in different styles.
(Illustrations by Robert Dress, Mariano Vidal, Janice Rim, and Dan Markowitz)
New Drew design
Eventually we landed on one style that felt like a good balance of modernizing the character while keeping key elements, exaggerating his shape for more unique branding, and setting the character up for more success in both action-packed motion and on the page in books.
We updated other characters and backgrounds to match the new art style and polish those characters as well. Then we made several remakes of older episodes featuring these new assets as an A/B test. Subjectively we felt like they were much more dynamic, appealing, and comparable to other modern children’s animation. The metrics proved this true: click-through rates increased on thumbnails featuring the new Drew, and retention rates increased for videos with the new characters far compared to content featuring the old artwork. Rates of likes/dislikes and comments from viewers supported this, as they seemed excited by the change and didn’t miss the old style. Audiences agreed that the new design was a hit!
The future
With the success of New Drew in animation, we carried this style into a best-selling series of graphic novels, and a separate book series and merchandise featuring similarly redesigned versions of our other popular characters Ms. Booksy and Crafty Carol (once again, remakes of old episodes featuring the new artwork proved that kids loved the change).
The updated art style was set, but there was still much more we could do to increase our product values and compete with other higher-budget children’s animation: we continued to improve the shading and special effects of characters, worked with a larger animation studio to illustrate different angles and poses for smoother character animation, and worked on more bespoke animation instead of reusing assets across episodes. We also continued to keep things fresh by keeping our eyes on what other children’s content was selling and being viewed, so we could compete
Cool School continued to grow thanks to the redesigned art style, increasing from 500 million views to nearly 2 billion views to date.