Introducing the Spike Island-based designers who won an Emmy

Unless you live in Beverley Hills, it’s an uncommon experience for most of us to sit across from someone at lunch while they casually tell you about the Emmy Award they won last week.

Yet, drinking tea in the baking hot sunshine at Emmeline café at Spike Island and chatting away to Neil Harris, founder, owner and creative director at Shop Studio, that is exactly what I’m doing.

In collaboration with Done and Dusted Productions in the US, the Shop team won the Outstanding Main Title and Graphic Design at the Daytime Emmys 2021 for the YouTube original, Dear Class of 2020. The programme was organised as a commencement event for high school graduates in the US who had missed out on their graduation ceremonies due to Covid.

It was the first project the Shop team ever worked on remotely during the first UK lockdown.

Their involvement in the project came about through their already close working partnership with Done and Dusted.

Working via Dropbox and against a seven-hour time difference, each team would work through the other’s night, visualising, designing and creating the graphics that made #DearClassof2020 so aesthetically pleasing, vibrant and relatable to its young audience.

Shop’s work for the original is perhaps best recognised through its sense of maximalism, created through intense animation, movement and colour.

Neil said: “As there was no presenter to link the videos, a lot of the linking through the programme had to be done by visuals. So, the visuals had a really important part in maintaining the interest of the viewer.”

The show features some of the world’s most famous faces, including Barack and Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Malala Yousafzai.

Despite Shop’s seemingly humble roots as a Bristol-based boutique design agency, they are no strangers to working on behalf of global stars.

Their website is studded with the names of clients they’ve worked for in the past, which include Stormzy and his show at Glastonbury, Ed Sheeran on his most recent tour and Gorillaz live concerts. Neil remains remarkably modest about the work he does.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8_4rSSpf3V/

The pressure behind the work at Shop remains on delivering a job in an industry with hard and fast deadlines. There’s no time to lose professionalism just because, say, Shakira and Beyonce are standing ten metres down the road from you.

It’s with this professionalism and the interests of the business at heart that despite the Emmy win, the team won’t be looking to expand Shop any further than they’re working already in the near future. The pandemic has taught them not to overstretch themselves, but to prioritise jobs and workload.

Neil said: “We called ourselves Shop because we wanted to be like a corner shop where you know all your customers’ names. We don’t want to get big and have lots of levels of management.

“The Emmy feels like a recognition of teamwork. The client relationship we have. I guess I feel proud of that part of it.”

Looking to the future, Shop will be looking to prioritise the quality of their content, not the quantity that they do. It may seem counterintuitive to describe the graphics which grounded Dua Lipa’s performance at the Grammys as ’boutique’ – yet, these guys are proving that their process is exactly that.

Neil is always on the lookout for new talent and is excited to meet young and gifted designers. To learn more, see: www.weareshop.co.uk/

Main photo: Robin Connolly 

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