tax season filing tips
tax season filing tips
The Ohio Department of Taxation’s Personal Income Tax division fields many questions from the public come tax season. In the past, the division offered live webinars in January to help get ahead of questions and disseminate pertinent information for the tax year. The long-form content, however, required Ohioans to register for the webinar and carve out an hour of their day. To lower these barriers to participation, the division asked the eLearning team to create a series of brief videos (~3 minutes each) about the most commonly asked questions. The videos were then added to the Department’s Youtube channel in a playlist called Tax Season Filing Tips.
As the lead designer on the project, I established the look and feel for the videos and created 8 videos.
I’d had success using Vyond to create animated explainer videos for another video series called Ohio Taxes Explained, so my instinct was to return to Vyond for this project. The built in character generator makes it easy to create a diverse cast of characters to reflect our tax payers. Additionally, in May 2026, Vyond released Storybook Characters, a new style of characters that affords a greater range of body shapes and sizes. They have the additional benefit of being able to adjust clothing and hair colors to match brand guidelines and lend cohesion across videos.
The hero character(s) appears throughout the videos helping to illustrate a single-narrator script, often by appearing alongside common tax forms or computer screens used for eFiling. The foregrounding of the characters reinforces the message that supporting our tax payers is the Department’s central focus. Meanwhile, showing actual file forms and screens builds tax payers’ familiarity with the tools they need for on time filing.
These videos were well-received by people both inside and outside of the Department of Taxation. Employees praised the simple explanations. Tax examiners in charge of auditing small businesses reported sending the videos to their clients to provide additional support. The business owners were grateful for the novel and helpful reminder of Ohio tax laws and procedures.