Back to the 80's

Concept - Art Direction - Shoot Direction - Design - Delivery

By Paul Maley - October, 2019

"In the long run, a lovable comedy by Idris Elba.

It's the 1980s and Walter's brother has brought chaos to his family's quiet lives.."

We're heading back to the 80's and we are taking the design with us.

Looking through the scripts for the show I Identified a few big series moments like the 80s strikes, the community spirit, and the again the theme of music that had run through the previous season too.

Show Proposition

An optimistic yet authentic sit-com of community, identity and cultural clashes in 1980s London.

The Creative

With music being such a massive part of the ITLR brand, where better to find influence and style than a fertile genre like some old vinyl records?

After looking through a number of relevant music styles Bluenote had something that spoke out to me. It gave great flexibility to create a graphic system to contain numerous talent options and different hierarchies to fit within the set deliverables.

However as always with design things are never that straight forward, ITLR already had a brand and palette, and whilst Bluenote was pre 80's, I felt this could still be adapted to the right retro feel it needed to portray.

Design of the time was less reliant on macs and alot was still done by hand so this helped create the feeling of the time and the Bluenote collage style I wanted to create. I set to work building up my freehand cut layers with the brand colours and the design system rules soon came quite easily. After all the positioning was created, It was just some finishing touches by adding textures and light shadowing to give a more realistic retro feel.