Gospel

BGSTR joined the McGee Media production with the goal of designing graphics that would both propel the series narrative and tap into the culture of gospel with sensitivity and the appropriate amount of reverence. Our design needed to encapsulate the ever-evolving musicality of traditional gospel and its continued throughline in the Black experience.

To achieve this sophisticated look, we put a ton of effort in our design exploration— pulling inspiration from the initial blue note jazz albums and leaning into the high-contrast, monochromatic look that defines that genre.

The beginnings of gospel can be traced to the specific cadence and tones of Black preaching. Our design reflects this shared history— we focused on the music itself and also the musicality of the sermon and how both things would come together. In this way we used the graphics to accomplish certain storytelling moments within the series.

Gospel’s four episodes are broken out chronologically following a different history of gospel in each episode. We used this evolution as a basis for the design growth as we played with traditional motifs like woodcuts and sheet music early on, eventually moving toward a very 90s-influenced design for the portion of the series featuring the HIV/AIDS crisis and then ultimately concluding in current times.

Working with McGee Media made the design process incredibly seamless thanks to them coming to the table with a clear vision but full trust in our process and team. They really leaned into letting us design the graphics to tell the parts of the story that had visual gaps when they needed to accomplish something for the narrative.

The range of personalities we covered were extremely diverse in range as well—for early audio-only recordings of preachers we transcribed the audio to develop a rise and falling animation that channeled their cadence. The series covers more contemporary figures as well, including Stevie Wonder and Dionne Warwick and we had to ensure the design fit there, too.

Toward the conclusion of the series, the Black Lives Matter movement is covered and we took a particularly sensitive approach to the portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that were featured. We hand-painted their portraits to give them a timeless yet ethereal feeling for their inclusion in the series, and I think both us and our client were really pleased with how those turned out.

Ultimately, the sense of collaboration we felt with our partners at McGee Media influenced the premium look and feel the design in this series was able to achieve. For every section of the series, they had a vision and were open to any big ideas we brought to the table to help them meet that vision regardless of how bold our approach was. It was extremely fulfilling for our team to incorporate so many techniques and be creatively versatile to fill all of the narrative arcs graphically.