The Plot Against America
Done in: 2019 / Customer: HBO / Task: Logo for Television Series produced by David Simon. Based on the Book by Philip Roth.
What the Client Needed
This 6-part miniseries is an American alternate history drama created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. It premiered on HBO on March 16, 2020. Any use of the swastika was off limits for this design.
The logo they ended up choosing is the one with the barbed wire. But I most loved the other…the one where America is mostly erased, shown below. It is very seldom that a word is so readable no matter how little of it is showing, and I hated missing that opportunity here.
Of course, logos for film are almost always set against very complex imagery, as you can see in the beautifully illustrated one-sheet advertising that was developed for the show. Would my “wiped” version of America have worked there? I like to think it would have, but one could certainly argue either way.