The Inheritance x Adobe Express
Client Adobe Express
My role: Creative Director and on-set Director across concept, art direction, AI-assisted production, storyboarding and full direction of the ident series.
The brief: Produce a TV sponsorship ident package for Adobe Express around their partnership with The Inheritance on Channel 4, the primetime game show hosted by Rob Rinder and featuring Liz Hurley. The challenge was to avoid the generic sponsorship bumper trap and instead create something that felt like it genuinely belonged in the world of the show.
What we made: Rather than treat the sponsorship as a badge, we built a creative concept directly from the show's own premise. The Inheritance centres on a contestant winning the fortune and estate of a wealthy deceased character, so we positioned Adobe Express as the design tool the new heir was using to modernise and personalise the estate to their own taste. The result was a highly stylised, art directed series of idents running at the open, close and across every ad break throughout the series, each one part of a coherent creative world rather than a standalone execution.
Results: The campaign was received very positively internally at Adobe, with specific recognition for the elevated and distinctive world we had created around the brand. It was cited as a significant step forward in how Adobe Express showed up creatively, moving the brand into a beautifully art directed, stylised environment that set a new benchmark for the sponsorship format.
Adobe Firefly in the creative process
One of the more distinctive aspects of this project was how deeply we integrated Adobe Firefly, Adobe's own generative AI tool, across every stage of production. From early concept development and ideation through to mood boarding, art direction and storyboarding, Firefly was embedded in the creative workflow rather than bolted on at the end. This wasn't AI as a shortcut, it was AI as a genuine creative collaborator at every stage of the process.
Opening ident
“Menu” 5” ident
“Robe” 5” ident
“Tennis” 5” ident
“Bathroom” 5” ident
Closing ident
The portrait hall
The closing ten-second ident was built around a camera pan down a grand hallway lined with period portraits, spanning the fifteenth to the twentieth century. To achieve the right visual authenticity across each period style, we used Firefly combined with carefully selected reference images to generate the portraits themselves.
Each portrait contained a deliberate Easter egg: every subject was depicted holding a piece of contemporary technology, a laptop, a tablet, a device of their era's future. The portraits were then individually styled and given a creative lift using Adobe's own tools, adding a subtle but distinctive design sensibility that sat between period accuracy and modern wit.
Once generated and refined, the portraits were printed at full scale onto canvas and mounted into ornate period frames, then dressed and lit on set for a practical shoot. The combination of AI generation and physical production gave the idents a richness and texture that a purely digital approach wouldn't have achieved.