Fifty Shades of Grey social media

From 2014 to 2015 I created graphics for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to promote both the theatrical and home entertainment releases of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. The challenge was to create elegant yet provocative visuals that emphasized the story’s “romance” while acknowledging what the book was really famous for — pseduo BDSM sex scenes. The campaigns for both releases had to appeal to hardcore fans of the book series while enticing a brand new movie-going audience but the color red was restricted to the hashtag only for the theatrical campaign while the home entertainment release’s particular goal of capturing a new curious male audience meant that the graphics could include slightly more direct sexual references and a lot more red.

I spoke about my experience designing for Fifty Shades in relation to some of my personal work as part of the first in a series of “Spectrum Talk” lectures organized by Tomoharu Matsuda and Jordan Yamaji Smith at Spiral, an arts complex on Omotesando in Tokyo.