TV show art and visual direction · Qatar, 2022
Al Arabi TV
Joe Show came back for a seventh season, and a seventh season is a particular kind of brief: the audience already knows what the programme looks like, so the work is to make it feel new without making it feel like a different show.
The remit was the whole visual direction — the set itself, the animated wall behind the host, the title sequence, the outro, and the separators that carry the programme between its segments. Everything a viewer sees that is not the presenter.
Television is the one medium where the identity has to survive being stood in front of. A set is a logo you can walk around, the wall behind the host is on screen for forty minutes at a time and cannot compete with him, and a separator has about three seconds to reset the room. They are the same brand problem, solved at three different speeds.

The wall behind the host: a city that runs for twenty-five thousand pixels and is only ever seen a screen at a time. Drag it — what the camera holds is a fraction of what was drawn, which is the whole trick of a background that has to move for forty minutes without repeating itself or pulling focus.
That illustration is the base for all of it — the intro, the outro, the فواصل إعلانية and the whole visual direction of the season. Here it is in action.


The teasers that announced the season, built from the same parts: the host in halftone, the cities the programme moves between, and the blocks of red and navy that the titles are made of.
The same teaser, recut for a story.


And the templates the motion was built on — the episode thumbnail, so that a season of them lines up in a feed.
And the guest frame, with the window left green for the clip and the name bar under it.

And the end of it.







And the original concept, which did not make the cut on budget: the same skyline built for real, cut into four layers that stand in front of one another — backdrop, then three pieces down to a base — with every silhouette in it a landmark from a country the programme reaches. Syria, Iran, Jordan, Qatar, Iraq, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon.
















