BA (Hons) Graphic Branding and Identity graduate designs for hit Netflix series

“Learn to face every intricate brief as a challenge to grow, both personally and professionally”

How did you get involved with the ‘Sex Education’ design project?

Around April 2019, I was very anxious about not finding a job right after graduation. This probably had something to do with my life-long battle with self-esteem, so I had to be proactive. I created a list of agencies I wanted to work for, and TEA: entertain was one of the top three places. When I joined them as a freelancer, I was over the moon!

It was still very early days there when the Creative Director approached me asking to hop on a Netflix-related project. When I heard it was ‘Sex Education’, I completely lost it!

Tell us a little bit about the design process.

Let's start by saying that it was a collective effort between different people all thinking like one. Everyone involved had to present ideas. Once we were happy with them internally, we needed to make sure Netflix was 100% on board.

At first, I can’t deny that I kept thinking my involvement was going to be a total failure. Luckily, when the team saw my excitement and fed my confidence, things started to change for me.

After some crucial research time spent reading the season 2 scripts, a range of rough sketches and amazing ideas from all of the team, we finally got a call from Netflix saying the showrunners loved my idea of a Renaissance-style painting concept, ‘Masterpiece’. They asked us to refine it further and deliver different key art, which is when teamwork came back into the mix!

We had to come up with more draft proposals for the final delivery. Again, we had to think about character poses and facial expressions to link them with each character’s storyline. The whole process was quite hectic but satisfying on so many levels. Watch out for some hinted symbolism in the character posters!