Squid Game

Squid Game became the most-watched thing Netflix had ever released, and it did it with a set of children's playground games and a colour palette borrowed from a school gymnasium. Pink jumpsuits, teal tracksuits, geometric masks. The design is why it spread so fast.

The premise is grim but the point isn't the violence - it's the debt. Every contestant volunteers because the alternative is worse, and Hwang Dong-hyuk spent over a decade unable to get the script made because it was considered too bleak. Then the economics it described got worse and suddenly it wasn't.

Red Light, Green Light with the enormous doll is the sequence everyone remembers, and it works because it lasts so long. The game is familiar, the stakes are not, and the show holds the shot.

The circle, triangle and square hierarchy on the guards' masks is an especially efficient bit of visual storytelling: rank, communicated without a word.

This collection covers the doll, the guards, the invitation card and the symbols. Recognisable at a glance, which is the whole point.