AMC

AMC Visual Identity Montage

Context

Collaborate with AMC’s in-house creative team to update the brand with a new on-air look and feel that’s modern, premium, and leads with the power and potential of its iconic original series.

Strategy

Reimagine every design detail of the channel with a minimal, content-first perspective—reducing to the essentials in order to elevate AMC’s award-winning storytelling above all else.

Solution

A refreshed AMC that bravely signals the brand’s transition from a cable channel to a premiere content company that is investing in and communicating its creativity across platforms.

Creative Context

AMC’s new design system centers on one unifying principle: Let the content lead.

We worked closely with AMC’s leadership to develop a new design and animation framework that would help put the creativity of its iconic shows front and center. That meant developing a more authentic, insider point of view for the brand across all audience touchpoints.

By focusing our creative efforts on moments of emotional storytelling, character development, and easter eggs from AMC’s iconic series, we were able to help pivot the company toward a more fan-focused, digital-first identity—while steering clear of network tropes like spoilers, recaps, or promotional gimmicks that shout over its content.

Design Strategy

We pushed the boundaries of AMC’s new strategy with a minimal design system aimed at giving fans a sense of constant immersion.

Our visual approach focused on three crucial design pillars: graphic minimalism, a content-generated color palette, and typographic versatility. By reducing AMC’s brand colors to a simple black and off-white palette, we were able to leverage the full-color spectrum of AMC’s content to build a more stylized and premium setting for its creativity to shine.

We set a robust family of font weights and styles that can be mixed and matched to the tone and aesthetic of every series, again putting the focus away from the brand and back on AMC’s beloved content and characters. Following this new design theory, we also created a new logo for the brand’s award-winning in-house content, distribution, and production company, AMC Studios.

Motion Language

In motion, AMC’s new system challenges traditional on-air hierarchies and leads with the power and potential of great stories—not flashy on-air graphics.

Every animation we developed builds from the AMC logo, which we updated to a more stream-worthy 16:9 ratio before building it out in motion. The network’s new motion language relies on subtle, content-to-content transitions instead of full-on graphic takeovers. Each new graphic element can be used as a frame, a window, or a sneak peek in a way that never detracts from the emotional, intense, or breathtaking moments of the content itself, giving the brand a more refined, immersive feel overall.

On-Air Toolkit

An accompanying in-house toolkit explored all of the ways AMC can infuse its masterbrand with original content.

To further reduce the need for extraneous elements, we invented a novel method for using show footage in promos and marketing, thus offering an endless variety of style options. Our animation toolkit effortlessly interprets and integrates footage into the logo, messaging, and other graphic devices, helping every moment of branding remain authentic to the palette, style, and mood of the content.

We also conceived and edited new promo formats where episodic show footage can be easily updated by AMC’s in-house editorial team. Meanwhile, a flexible title card toolkit allows designers to easily select the typographic style they prefer for each situation, making every element on AMC instantly more tailored, expressive, emotional, and of course—content-focused.