SXSW
Every network wrapped buses in key art. Showtime needed a different strategy.
Starting in 2018, the SXSW campaign became its own brand — built not around what Showtime wanted to promote, but around what the Austin audience wanted to experience. The approach: commission one local illustrator per year to create a holistic visual world under creative direction. Print, premiums, out-of-home, wraps, digital, and social — all of it unified under a single artistic hand. The result was a campaign people sought out rather than walked past.
SXSW 2020
Pedro Correa created the 2020 campaign — a richly illustrated system where each featured show had its own custom Showtime logo variant. Every piece of master art was designed to be reconfigured into a range of character-driven executions, giving the campaign flexibility across formats without losing cohesion. The work was complete. Then, on March 6th, Austin cancelled the festival as COVID-19 began spreading in the U.S. The tactics were never produced. The art was briefly considered for the final season of Shameless but never repurposed. The campaign exists as finished work that never met its audience.
Sketch Phase
Before any final art, Pedro Correa built the campaign from the ground up in sketch form — working through compositions, character studies, and logo integration across every show. The sketches reveal the decision-making behind the finished system: how a consistent visual language flexes across multiple properties without losing distinctiveness. Each show required its own solution.
Desus & Mero / The Good Lord Bird
The finished art for Desus & Mero and The Good Lord Bird shows how far the system could reach. Two shows with nothing in common visually — one a late-night talk show, one a Civil War-era miniseries — each resolved within the same illustrative language. Together, they're a window into what the full campaign would have been.
SXSW 2019
Ana Strumpf brought the 2019 campaign to life with a visual identity built to travel — across buses, badges, posters, and digital placements. Each Showtime property received its own visual treatment within a unified system. 417,400 people moved through Austin that year.
SXSW 2019 — Showtime House Video
The campaign didn't stop at print and out-of-home. The Showtime House brought it to life — a physical space where Ana Strumpf's work moved off the wall and into the festival. The video captures it in motion: live mural painting, street scenes from outside the House, and talent from the featured shows appearing organically in the space. Jacob Latimore from The Chi. Paul Scheer from Black Monday. The art as environment, not backdrop.
SXSW 2018
The first year of the sub-brand strategy. In collaboration with Mondo, Oliver Barrett created original artwork for six Showtime properties — Shameless, SMILF, Ray Donovan, Homeland, The Chi, and Billions — deployed across bus wraps, signage, posters, flyers, tote bags, bikes, and more. A single artistic voice directing a full campaign system, each show its own visual world inside a shared identity. What started as a pitch to the marketing department became the model for every SXSW campaign that followed. Over 300,000 people across music, film, and conference tracks.
