When designing sets for television news, the world’s leading designers operate according to the ancient mantra – form follows function. Designers adapt technology and brand image to the serious tone of news, and yet create a distinct identity that will attract viewers. How? Experts reveal their secrets to MEB Journal.

Wael Sersy
Technical Operations Director
Al Jazeera

First and foremost, the set must reflect the Al Jazeera image and brand, Sersy says. “The viewer should feel the atmosphere of Al Jazeera,” he explains. In designing Al Jazeera’s sets, Sersy works with colors that match the channel’s trademark watery blue. He talks of constants and variables in set design – at Al Jazeera, the azure tone and the golden logo are constants, and the variables are touches made to each program that put it in tune with Al Jazeera’s identity. Sersy’s goal for news sets is that they have an international look – similar to those in the West, but neither West nor East alone. “We don’t want to make it too Oriental,” he says.

Designing sets for programs other than news broadcasts offers Sersy more freedom, he says, and makes it easier to give a program a unique identity. News sets demand seriousness – form must follow function. For example, some Jazeera news broadcasts depend heavily on satellite interviews and Sersy has to design the set accordingly.
Some news programs use virtual studios – “a good choice if you’ve got good designs,” Sersy says. With a bad design, a virtual set looks plastic and unreal, he says. His solution is to integrate simple, real items such as plants and carpets with the virtual background.
As Sersy tries to encapsulate the program’s function in its set design, his main rules are simplicity and following nature, with lighting and depth crucial aspects for implementing his philosophy. One subtle trick involves changing the colors of a news set’s lighting to correspond to different times of day.
Sersy also uses lighting to create the image of depth, with objects lit more strongly the farther they are from the camera. Placing elements of the set, such as the logo or a partition, at different distances from the camera also helps emphasize depth. “Depth is very important in our designs,” Sersy says.
Depth is one of the keys that Sersy sees set designers working with around the world now. News sets from one continent look more and more similar – “almost the same,” he says. Designers play with depth to make sets look bigger, and the use of moving cameras is particularly now in vogue.
“Everybody is using the same elements,” Sersy says. “The way that you combine the elements creates difference.”

Rena Golden
Senior Vice President
CNN International

CNN International recently unveiled a new set as part of its “Look and Feel” design campaign, which kicked off in early 2005. Golden wanted the design elements to help tell news stories better. “It was really to showcase the journalism,” she says. “It’s all designed to complement the journalism rather than detract from it.”
CNN also needed to create continuity between its far-flung broadcast centers in London, Atlanta, and Hong Kong. Set design was one way to accomplish that.
How to achieve this continuity? First, reduce clutter – give viewers a break from gaudy graphics and other distracting visuals. “We decided to move away from the cluttered screens,” Golden says.
Still, a news wall behind the anchor desk stands as the focal point of the new set, but its goal is to supply relevant and complementary information to stories, so that the stories assume the lead role and the screen is part of the supporting cast.
“The centerpiece of the set is the news wall,” Golden says, to give “essential context” for each day’s big stories: “the wall isn’t there as eye candy.” The wall features sharper and crisper video and graphics, as well as still photos and animation. CNN has to have state-of-the-art screens, simply because they have video feeds coming in so many different formats, Golden says.
The news wall replaces the previous design, where viewers saw into the newsrooms behind many of CNN’s anchors. “We’re moving away from the newsroom as a backdrop,” Golden says.
The new set also uses color to create an identity – red is CNN’s main channel color, while for the new set, designers chose yellow as the color for breaking news, because yellow functions as a warning color around the world, even though that breaks with traditional news-set design, Golden says. CNN also incorporates blue and green in its sets, and very few other colors.
Along with the physical set, CNN also changed its graphics, titles, animation and music.
Looking at trends in news sets elsewhere, Golden talked about the clutter afflicting so many news sets today – multiple screens, gaudy graphics and loud sound effects.

Mack McLaughlin
CEO and creative director
FX Group

Mack McLaughlin sees his goal in set design as putting the right technology in the right place. Gadgets cannot get in the way of a news broadcast – they are subservient to function. The role of a news set designer is “giving [clients] the proper technology to deliver the story that they’re trying to deliver,” he says.
McLaughlin’s FX Group helped develop the news set for CNBC, which he characterizes as elegant, if “a little over the top – it’s huge.” However McLaughlin does most of his work for network affiliates in the US, mid- to small-size stations in the United States that do not have the budget or desire for such an ostentatious set. He cited a recent set for an Orlando, Florida affiliate as a typical project where the cityscape was used as the primary background. In an echo of Wael Sersy’s comments, the background changes color for broadcasts at different times of the day.
McLaughlin sees US stations steering away from two-story sets à la CNBC; a station wants sets with much less elevation and more width, partly because of the move to high-definition television. One other trend he sees is more interest in the weather portion of news broadcasts – stations are ordering 60- and 70-inch screens (1.53 meters and 1.79 meters) for weather forecasts, he says.

Yara Issa el Khoury
Head of Set Design Department
LBCI

El Khoury also repeats the mantra of matching form and content in news-set design. “We should absorb the essence in order to deliver the image we seek to present,” she says. This applies for every program genre, not just news. “It is all a matter of setting an image, and creating a set where the presenter feels comfortable,” El Khoury says.
For LBCI’s news sets, El Khoury wants to create a sense of interactivity. Designs strive to emphasize three-dimensional aspects, and to evoke a feeling of comfort, she says. “In the news, we want the viewers to experience the feeling inside the studio.”
She also focuses on expressing the LBCI brand clearly in its sets. “We always try to maintain the close relationship between the perceived image and our viewers,” she explains. She and her team adhere to general trends, but adapt the trends to LBCI’s image. “Now we can directly identify LBCI from what we see on its screen,” she says.
El Khoury has been at LBCI for 20 years, and she credits teamwork foremost for producing sets that correspond to LBCI’s image and its audience.