HITSTER is one of the best-selling party games around: draw a card, hear a song, place it on your timeline. Turning that into a TV format meant moving the game from a tabletop to a studio built almost entirely from LED screens. The look had to work on an array of different sized screens; from a giant center staged cube to a lower third, in every country that picks up the format.
Success would be a visual language that breathes HITSTER even when the logo isn’t in frame. Clear enough for contestants reading their timeline, bold enough for viewers at home and solid enough to travel around the world. After The Netherlands and Germany the format has since been picked up globally, including Canada, America and Spain.
At its core, the HITSTER logo is a single line of light. We made that line the engine of the show. It bursts into frequencies like a waveform, fans out into colour or traces the shape of an icon. The lines move with the music by SMP and run through every screen, so the whole studio feels like one living soundwave.
We came on board in the conceptual phase, defining the overall look and feel and sharing early ideas with BigVis Stage Design. Once production started, we created all content for the LED walls, the central cube and the timeline desks, with icons drawn from the same white line as the logo. Light Image brought it all to life on set, handling the game technology and media server playback.
In the board game, every song is a card. On TV, every song is a cube. We extended the palette into a broad spectrum so each cube gets its own colour on the timeline desk. When a new song drops in, the cubes make way. After the guess, it flashes green or red before settling into its own colour. Every reveal becomes a moment.
The same line builds everything on screen: leader, bumpers, cold open frames, lower thirds and split screens. Coloured lines stack into a white bar, so text can appear without its own animation.
Everything was delivered as a broadcast-ready toolkit with alpha and key-and-fill versions, ready for every local production. Clearly documented in a styleguide. Ready to be used in different countries.
