Real life. Big drama. That’s the tagline for E.W. Scripps’ new female-focused diginet TrueReal, which offers more than 6,000 hours of content mostly drawn from A&E’s library of original series.

Scripps tasked Atlanta-based creative agency Creative Mammals with creating a dramatic, modern and sophisticated brand identity, complete with custom comprehensive graphics toolkit. That look had to be highly flexible because of TrueReal’s breadth of programming, which ranges from shows like Storage Wars to Little Women: LA to Married at First Sight to Wahlbergers.

“One of the things we wanted to always show was that … even for [more intense] shows like Hoarders and Intervention, the end result is happy,” said Robert Burroughs, Creative Mammals’ creative director.

RELATED: Jules Verardi Joins Creative Mammals as Art Director

Focused on those ideas, Creative Mammals crafted four vibrant color themes and selected two all-caps, sans-serif typefaces to define the network’s overall look. It also took the network’s logo, which it already had in place when Creative Mammals came on board, and used its innate parallelogram to shape the graphics system.

“We started with a dos and don’ts list,“ said Jules Verardi, Creative Mammals’ art director. “We didn’t want this identity to be quiet but instead bold, energetic and in your face. Once we boiled down who the audience is and what the programming is, those dos and don’ts were super helpful. We landed on bold typography and we went with really loud colors. Once we determined the hero palette, we realized we needed to be able to package these colors together.”

TrueReal’s palette is anchored by a hero theme that the agency named “Opulent Orange” and includes white, bold orange, hot pink and dark navy. The hero theme is intended to feel exciting, glamorous and dramatic, purveying the network’s attributes.

From there, Creative Mammals extracted three other palettes. “You Had Me At Yellow” is intended to be uplifting, light-hearted and humorous and to be used with TrueReal’s more comedic fare. It’s colors include white, yellow, hot pink and a more periwinkle-toned blue.

“Something New, Something Blue” is a cool palette designed with more serious fare in mind and includes white, ice blue, cool-toned hot pink and dark navy. Finally, “Ready for Commit-ment,” also a cool palette, includes a mint green as the name promises and is intended to accompany more somber, introspective and personal content. Other colors in that palette include the periwinkle and navy blues as well as a cool-toned yellow as the accent color.

The team also drew from the logo to create the branding system’s backplates, turning the logo into a simple parallelogram that could be used as an in-frame window.

Finally, Creative Mammals added the option to include some textures in the background or even still artwork drawn from the shows themselves.

With all that in place, Creative Mammals used the essential graphics panel within Adobe After Effects to create a custom graphics toolkit to allow TrueReal’s in-house team to quickly and easily create bespoke graphics packages for any of its shows.

“It’s a lot of assets and a lot of deliverables. A lot of work went into making sure we were in sync with each other,” said Verardi. “We built this brand identity to be as bulletproof as possible and then to deliver it in such a way that non-After Effects artists could easily update the essential things. We delivered it so that their in-house designers could take it and run with it.”

READ MORE: Creative Mammals

CREDITS

Client: E. W. Scripps’ TrueReal

Senior Director: Kelly Turner

VP, Creative Services and Marketing: Bryan Slonaker

VP, Creative Services: Larry Morris

Design Studio: Creative Mammals

Executive Creative Director: Robert Burroughs

Art Director: Nick Trivundza, Jules Veradi

Animator: Apollo Baldoz, Tynesha Foreman, Jonathan Hunt

Editor: Chris Meidell

Marketing Strategist: Heather Bell

Senior Producer: Brandy Drew

Sound Design, Sizzle: Soundbyte

Tags: brand campaign creative mammals e.w. scripps soundbyte truereal


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