InDesigner: Showtime’s The Red Group

“Showtime” is the name of a group of subscription television channels headquartered in the United States. Its programming, while heavy on movies, also includes an increasing number of original series (such as Weeds, Dexter, and The Tudors). Promoting those series and the channels’ other offerings is the job of the in-house staff known as The Red Group.

Paul Nicholson, vice president of print and broadcast production, says that the growing success of Showtime’s original series is a two-edged sword. “Now we can be proud of the shows we promote, but there’s a lot more scrutiny over everything we do. There are lots of last-minute changes, micro-management, emergency ads. It’s harder, but a lot more rewarding.”

There are more than 60 creatives in the print side of The Red Group. In a year, they design and prepare 2,000 to 2,5000 jobs for printing. The jobs range from press kits to posters, bus wraps to banners.

“The work has really increased for us as the shows’ success has increased,” Paul says. “We haven’t added any staff—in fact, we have less staff than before. We’re able to do our jobs because of the switch to InDesign.

“In our fast-paced production environment,” he continues, “even something as simple as adding a drop shadow or making something transparent in InDesign has saved us thousands of hours. We generate a lot of PDF output for approvals and publication. Being able to export a PDF out of the design application as opposed to taking the extra steps to distill a PDF is a tremendous timesaver.”

To keep the quality and volume high, The Red Group is set up like a traditional ad agency, with an account group, production managers, and so on, even though their clients are other departments within the company. A large FileMaker database helps manage jobs, including time tracking so the group can bill clients appropriately.

When one season of one series can involve the creation of many different pieces, inconsistency is a potential problem. To solve it, designers often concentrate on a particular program. Art director Wendy Wilson has been working under creative director Michael Hathaway on Dexter. “We’ve produced all the print ads, billboards, press kits, every tactic for Dexter,” she says. “The senior AD or CD at the helm conveys their vision to the team. We work very closely together to make sure all the title treatments are consistent and all art is produced within the same color range.”

The Red Group switched from QuarkXPress to InDesign 2 in the application’s relatively early days: Paul notes, “My philosophy is to be on cutting edge, to be one step ahead. You have to keep up or you’re extinct—you wake up five years later and some young kid is replacing you. We’re able to do that because we have passionate men and women who keep on top of the field.”