Your background sucks: Production design for vloggers
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Back in 2005 and 2006, YouTube videos were primarily made in bedrooms or a dorm room (if you were fancy). The background was not considered at all, it was just whatever happened to be behind you.
That’s no longer true. The top vloggers have backgrounds that represent who they are. Don’t get me wrong: they’re authentic, but it’s a studied, deliberate authenticity.
So how do you design a modern vlog ‘set’?
Perhaps the first major example of production design in vlogs was in 2006. Lonelygirl15 may have seemed like a normal 16 year old vlogger, but everything in her room was bought on the same day in target. That’s because, in reality, she was a 19 year old actress. The idea of a fake vlogger was such a big deal in 2006 that it made the cover of Wired Magazine.
Ah, simpler times.
Lonelygirl15 was a harbinger of things to come, because as anyone who has heard the real sound of horse hooves or sat on a jury knows: reality is unrealistic. The backgrounds of today can’t just be your bedroom. Why? Because your bedroom is probably visually boring, and doesn’t say anything about you.
So how do you design a modern vlogging background? Well, conventional wisdom might be: make it brightly colored, high contrast and have depth of field, like you do with your thumbnails.
Your colour choices can indicate your vertical. 94% of the top 50 beauty channels include strong pinks or whites in their production colour scheme.
You can also subvert your verticals expectations. For a long time gamers had drab, brown basement sets and PewDiePie stood alone with an absurd pair of brightly coloured headphones. These days, there seems to be an astonishing amount of focus on what kind of chair you have, and green screens are making a comeback.
But it’s not just about aesthetics — your vlogging background communicates something about who you are. When vloggers have their bed in the background, they are saying this is intimate. You’re literally in the most intimate space in their house. Booktubers have books in the background which instantly communicates “I’m a reader”. Science vlogger Alex Danis (who you may remember from our women in science article) has her lab in the background, which gives her both authority and authenticity.
A bad background can actually hurt your channel — Emma Blackery found this when she changed her background to be more professional. One viewer expressed it in the comments as:
I can’t help but feel a little betrayed. There’s now a barrier between us, with the “I do this because it’s my job, not necessarily because I want to” aura.
You might find that as your content or ‘brand’ changes, so does your background. TomSka found that after years vlogging in front of a wall of guns, they no longer represented who he was or what he believed in.
If all this sounds intimidating to you, don’t worry. This isn’t about suddenly changing everything about your background. Phillip DeFranco took years to develop his background, but he slowly created a style that worked for him.
So he took years to develop his background, but now his videos look amazing. Although, maybe he could invest in a different coloured shirt!
During my research, I spent many hours screenshotting Philip DeFranco and calculating pixel colour ratios for beauty gurus, but I was never able to figure out one thing.
What is it with the fairy lights?!
Like, I get that they’re cheap, and like kinda cool, and there’s obviously a viral nature to this. But why are they so common?! I’ll leave you with this one girl who took the whole fairy lights thing to stunning new heights. Scotland is dark, yo.
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