Discovery’s automotive-themed Velocity has touched a nerve since it launched in 2011, quickly ascending to be No.1 among men for networks with less than 70 million subscribers.

Much more than just a channel about cars, this rapid rise “echoes the varied personalities and stories Velocity features,” said senior marketing director Douglas Lerner, and poises it “to be the next global brand for our parent company Discovery Communications Inc.”

To that end, a new on-air look was deemed necessary to reflect Velocity’s position as the leading network for automotive enthusiasts. At the core of this refresh, branding production company Nathaniel Howe Studios was brought in to create one flagship hero ID and six network IDs that would “highlight the depth of content featured on Velocity,” said Lerner by corresponding to the channel’s six essential programming tenets: Motorsports, DIY, Builds & Restoration, Treasure Hunts, Auctions and Consumer News.

Given that Velocity’s original brand package was almost all live-action, Lerner said his team wasn’t sure at first “if animation would fit or if animated IDs would work with our existing elements,” but realized at first pitch that Nathaniel Howe “understood the Velocity brand and we knew this was the right next step forward.”

The natural starting point for the new spots, Lerner continued, was the Velocity logo, “a mark that communicates our automotive roots, precision craftsmanship, attitude and upscale intensions.”

In looking to bring the logo to life and have it embody the network’s different programming values, Nathaniel Howe sought “to find a way to make each animation be unique and speak to the genre, said company founder Nathaniel Howe, “but to also be unified and have a through-line and consistency and formula to them.”

As shown above, each ID begins by immersing viewers in its respective “world that speaks to the programming genre,” said Howe, only to smoothly reveal that “we are actually on the reverse side of the logo” via an “an exciting camera move” that propels the viewer out from the mark’s backside and around to the front. This structure works at both the micro-level, as in this ID aligning with Velocity’s DIY programming tenet which starts out in the intimate, intricate space of an engine:

… and the structure works at the macro level as well, as in this ID for Velocity’s Motorsports programming tenet, which places the thrills of an entire race track, as well as the landscape around it, on the back of the logo:

Nathaniel Howe also was tasked with producing sound design for the IDs, which they did in conjunction with the audio house Hot Sake. In the below ID that aligns with Velocity’s Auctions programming tenet, the distinctive noises of an auction floor add a cinematic quality to the spot, ranging from the hushed murmur of an excited crowd to the auctioneer’s mile-a-minute banter:

The cumulative effect of each ID’s seamless transition from a physical environment to the logo’s artful abstraction is to hint at entire programming realms hidden behind the Velocity brand, making it feel, said Howe, like nothing less than a Chevy Camaro ZL1 hurtling down the highway: “big and important and powerful.”

The IDs not only meet the objective of showing the depth of the Velocity brand through reveals of its content themes that are as thrilling as the content itself, but “they help inspire future content,” said Lerner, while staying true to the network’s founding principles. “One of the things we like best about this new work is how well we think it works with our existing brand package,” he continued. “We were able to layer in these new elements and it all works together while meeting our objective and freshening the on-air look of the network.

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