Printed Pages, s/s 2016

If you’ve been spending any time on Twitter or Instagram lately, you’ll have seen the new Printed Pages triad of covers featuring the Becky and Joe puppets Yellow Guy, Red Guy and Duck Guy respectively. To say farewell and celebrate ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’, which is releasing its final episode this upcoming June, the It’s Nice Team decided to pay homage with timely covers.

Today, art director Jamie McIntyre shares photos from the shoot and fills us in on all the behind-the-scene details.

We got wind in mid-January that Becky and Joe’s final episode of ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’ was coming this June.

As massive fans here at It’s Nice That, we felt we had to do something super fun in the lead up to this. Around the same time, The Guardian released a lovely written piece on the background to the show accompanied with some quotes from Becky and Joe about their epic journey. We wanted to get closer to the puppets themselves than any retrospective overview of the whole story. Much closer.

The puppets are always seen in busy set designed environments and in moving image. We wanted to remove all of this noise and really pay homage to them as if they were iconic models or statues, but still have that warmth that you see in them on screen. I saw a photo Neil Bedford had shot of Law Holt (above). I loved the animated quality to the portrait. It instantly reminded me of Duck and I knew Neil had to be the guy.

To top the covers off we have an interview piece within the magazine interviewing the characters themselves. Owen, our editor, came up with the idea of posing every question that was asked, but not answered, in each episode of the series - which would allow the characters to reveal a little more about themselves. When Owen showed me the transcript of the interview as the photos arrived from Neil, I knew it was going to work.