It was the beginning of a new millennium, but in 2000 US cable channel TV Land was feeling a bit behind the times. The hub to watch reruns of retro shows such as I Love Lucy, Green Acres and The Ed Sullivan Show was struggling with the perception that its brand was synonymous with dusty old television. In need of a refresh, it turned to the then year-old Trollbäck + Company, New York to help the brand connect with a younger audience while still playing up the nostalgia of its programming.

“It was a pretty big challenge for us because we were a young company, and with a lot of Europeans on staff we weren’t really that into nostalgia and the retro aesthetic,” explains founder Jakob Trollbäck. “TV Land really wanted to capture the spirit of nostalgia but also make it feel modern. We were completely stuck as to what we could do.”

The designers’ inspiration ended up being right in front of, or rather all around, them. The Trollbäck offices were decked out in the furniture and artworks of the American Modernists. It was the ideal solution: the team could tap into an aesthetic that was forward-thinking in its time, but still very much of that time, an era that corresponded with TV Land’s programming.

“When we started to look around the office, we noticed we had all of this Eames furniture and George Nelson lamps,” says Trollbäck. “I had a couple of Alexander Calder prints and suddenly it was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is also what happened during this period.’ We were excited about taking a cue from these cool people who worked within the culture of the ’60s, but did it in a way that was modern.”

The color palette, graphic shapes and designs in the promos, which were stylized motion-based renderings of its programming, all took their cue from the Modernist approach, creating a visual language that would come to define a whole new look in motion graphics. Q

www.trollback.com