Red Ventures • TV Guide • 2022
TV Guide 100 Best Shows 2022 Branding
Role(s): Lead Designer, Art Director
Every year the TV Guide editorial team puts together its 100 Best Shows on TV list, and for 2022 they asked me for the branding and art direction. The #1 pick that year was ABC’s Abbott Elementary.
My Responsibilities:
• Digital cover featuring Abbott Elementary
• Top 100 Shows branding
• In-article imagery
• Branded thumbnails
• Social promo assets
Our #1 show was set in an elementary school, so I built the look around things you’d find in one. The cover is illustrated to feel colorful, hopeful and vibrant, like the show and its cast. Everything else pulls from classroom materials: ruled paper, construction paper, ripped edges and roughly sketched letters.
Results
First cover
My first magazine-style cover, after 8 years designing at IGN.
Cast keepsake
ABC printed and framed the cover for every member of the Abbott Elementary cast.
Live at SDCC
The cover stood at the entrance of the full Abbott Elementary school recreation at Comic-Con.
The cover + web iteration of the story
The cover piece of this was by far the most exciting of all. As a long-time editorial design fanatic, the idea that I would be the one creating a cover for one of the most prominent brands in TV history was both daunting and unbelievably exciting. To make it happen we hired an amazing freelance illustrator who executed this illustration you see above.
I gave her my pitch of setting the scene inside the teachers’ lounge at the school and having all the other characters milling around the show’s star (and show runner) Quinta Brunson at its center. She and I worked through a few rounds of sketches and eventually landed on this layout. Her stylistic choice and use of amazingly bold color made for a cover image I could not be more proud of.
TVG 100 Best Shows cover
Illustration credit: Cora Jaeschke
The cover story as it ran on TVGuide.com
Past covers
Covers in the past usually relied on in-person photography and some kind of photoshoot involving the entire cast of the show. Unfortunately for Abbott this year due to COVID, the cast wasn’t able to get together for a photo. This led to my initial idea to do the illustration in the first place as a way to still make our cover stand out and shine.
Key decision
An illustrated cover, not a photoshoot. The other options were a collage of individual cast headshots, or a more abstract way to show the show.
Top 100 covers for 2020 and 2021
Social assets + banners
Besides the cover image I was tasked with helping create, we also needed to represent the feature as a whole. Since we had constraints on our budget for illustration this piece had to be collaged together with real imagery instead of something more custom.
I brought in the elements from the cover that were emblematic to the overall style and wove them into each of the prominent shows we were featuring, tying together the visual motifs from the entire package.
Cover image made for the 100 Best Shows article
The SDCC experience
One of the coolest aspects of this whole project was it released right around the time of Comic Con in San Diego. With this year being one of the first since COVID to have a large crowd return, in person activations were back in full force.
Abbott Elementary received a full recreation of the school and the best part was that right at the entrance to the school was the cover image we had created for the feature, printed beautifully at large scale.
Video showing the in-person Abbott Elementary activation
The logo
The logo itself needed to be something that fit within the style of the elementary school I was trying to achieve. The end result was something that encapsulated the exact feeling and vibe I wanted to hit with this branding. Something that felt like it could be pieced together on an elementary student’s notebook or in art class, something that wasn’t overly proper and provided a sense of fun and vibrancy.
Key decision
Schoolhouse materials as the motif. The rips are real torn paper, scanned into the file by hand.
Top 100 logo isolated
The inspiration
The logo itself needed to be something that fit within the style of the elementary school I was trying to achieve. The end result was something that encapsulated the exact feeling and vibe I wanted to hit with this branding. Something that felt like it could be pieced together on an elementary student’s notebook or in art class, something that wasn’t overly proper and provided a sense of fun and vibrancy.
Examples of street art that inspired the vibe for the logo
The process
As you can see, getting to the point of finality with the logo (and the cover) was a long process with many variations. These also speak to the way I usually like to create work and build on top of it as I go. It usually leaves my art boards a complete nightmare but it also gives me a detailed history of the variations and steps along the way.
The artboard madness involved in creating a brand
The cover artboard, from early comps to the final
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