We caught up with Junior Designer Aidan McCully over his go-to fuel combo: an oat cappuccino and a YoPro (that’s protein yoghurt for the uninitiated). Fresh off reinventing the Big Brother look, Aidan’s been at Paramount for a hot minute – long enough to leave his mark on some of our biggest campaigns, but new enough that his design degree certificate probably still smells like fresh ink.
You’re relatively new to the game, how long have you been at Paramount?
I’ve been at Paramount ANZ for a year and eight months. My career is still fresh and quickly evolving. I graduated from my bachelors of Visual Communication in Design at UTS in 2023 and landed my job at 10 in February of 2024. My portfolio of skills and experience has been developing ever since.
Tell us about your role in Design.
My role involves developing 10’s marketing campaign design from concept to final product. Starting at Key Art concepting to help create the look for a season of a show, to briefing and sometimes directing photoshoots with various talent. I use the Adobe Suite to bring our ideas to life, iterating and collaborating with the rest of the Design team to make the design style for our marketing.
Once we have the show look, I design for all sorts of projects such as outdoor billboards, buses, print media, and social posts. We also do photo retouching for publicity, create internal communications graphics, and more!
What do you like most about your job here at Paramount?
The team I work with is very supportive in allowing me to work on a wide variety of projects, and develop my career by pushing me to try new skills.
What a career highlight, we hear you are working on Big Brother. Tell us a bit about how that design evolved.
When I heard Big Brother was coming back I knew it was going to be BIG! I jumped into concepting and key art design with my art director Karen Song, and we found that the campaign needed to hit a few different marks, the first being nostalgia, and the second being bold and disruptive.
For nostalgia we leant into the iconic BB eye, stylising it within a digital, retro, futuristic space, hinting at surveillance. And then for bold and disruptive, we made a new logo lockup of BB10, celebrating the return of Big Brother back to 10.
On top of this I also created an alternate design for the host, focusing on Mel Tracina and Dreamworld. This art, combined with the great work of the motion and promos team, has created a punchy and hopefully very successful campaign.
We hear you were part of a successful Steptember team. How hard was it to get those steps in?
Steptember was a great challenge and added onto my fitness routine, my team and I changed some commute habits to walk further each day, and I added more running into my week, every step counts. Shoutout to Belle, Viv, and Kaz for the big effort!
What are some of your favourite shows on 10/Paramount+?
Survivor: Australia V The World was awesome, but Lingo and Taskmaster take the cake.
When you’re not at work, what are you doing for fun?
During the summer I’m usually at the beach in the waves, otherwise going to the gym with mates, playing football and futsal, or listening to music on a drive.
