Exclusive: How Production Designer Bruton Jones Made Hillman the Place to Be in A Different World
By Elizabeth Paige Richardson | October 1, 2026 | Best TV Shows
The students strolling around campus on A Different World may be the stars of the show, but none of it would be possible without the incredible backdrop of Hillman College. Behind the scenes of the Netflix sequel, the production crew engineered a way to make the HBCU campus the world fell in love with feel like an updated safe space for celebration, community, and relationship drama to unfold.
The sequel’s production designer, Bruton Jones, was instrumental in making the fictional campus feel like a real, welcoming place. From the Pit, where students like Rashida Duvall (Alijah Kai) and athlete Shaquille Johnson (Cornell Young IV) hang out, to the dorm rooms, Jones built the show’s world with a little imagination and by drawing on Atlanta’s HBCU campuses to recreate Hillman’s energy.
In an exclusive chat with DivaGalsDaily, Jones shared how he constructed a Hillman that didn’t feel trapped in the 1990s, where audiences last left it. Drawing on local Atlanta inspiration to create a visual language and history uniquely Hillman-coded, the production designer had a lot to say about the look and aesthetics of the Netflix top ten series.
Creating A Hillman Campus for the Modern Era
Throughout the original six seasons, A Different World fans became enchanted not only by the cast of unique students navigating life at Hillman but by the environment itself. From the common room in Gilbert Hall dorms to the packed chairs and tables in the Pit, audiences “remember walking across Hillman even though Hillman doesn’t physically exist.”
“I didn’t have to recreate Hillman. I had to imagine what happened to Hillman while we were gone,” Jones said. “That’s an unusual challenge for a Production Designer: build a fictional college that millions of people already believe they know. Hillman has no real campus—and yet it has alumni in the audience.”
Jones had to balance two realities: delivering a campus that felt familiar to established fans while giving new audiences something to connect to. The best way to bridge those two distinctly different concepts, he says, was to transform the set into “an institution with a past” of graduating generations of students.
“My job was to preserve those essential details while layering in the passage of time—bridging where the series left off with where we are today culturally, emotionally, and creatively.
The photograph of Mr. Gaines in The Pit is a good example. For longtime viewers, seeing him is immediate—you know who he is and what he meant to that place. For a new generation, the photograph says something else: someone important came before you. That’s what happens in real institutions. People become part of their history.”
Jones’ work was aided by a shift in formats. While the original series was filmed using the common multi-camera format of the 1990s, the sequel uses a single-camera setup that younger audiences have come to expect.
“Instead of primarily observing these environments from one side, the camera can now move through and around them,” the production designer explained. “That gave us an opportunity to make Hillman feel more dimensional and immersive, as though life on this campus continued even when the audience wasn’t there.”
A Layered History Inspired by Atlanta’s HBCUs
Hillman College could not have come to life without studying the culture and atmosphere of more than 100 real HBCU campuses across the nation. In particular, Jones found inspiration in institutions in the Atlanta area, calling it a “legendary epicenter of Black higher education.”
“At Morehouse, you can encounter the history embodied in Graves Hall. At Spelman, you see that legacy continuing alongside contemporary spaces such as the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts. And across the Atlanta University Center, the Robert W. Woodruff Library represents another kind of connection—an institution shared by multiple HBCU communities.”
“Atlanta gave us a living visual language for that evolution. The architecture, the campus environments, and, most importantly, the communities helped us think about how Hillman could honor where it came from while still unmistakably belonging to the students who inhabit it today,” he continued.
His keen eye as a production designer allowed him to recognize that alongside their distinct buildings, each campus was rooted in a history that evolved over time.
“Across these campuses, you see a visual layering in the architecture that bridges the past and the present. Historic buildings remain while new architecture rises around them. Students continue to move through those spaces, create traditions, challenge traditions, and leave something of their generation behind. That was an important lesson for Hillman. A campus with history shouldn’t look frozen in time. It should carry evidence of the people who have lived there.”
Artwork Tells a Story Without Needing Words
“Just as every HBCU has its own unique traditions and culture, Hillman needed to reveal its own distinct energy,” Jones explained about crafting a visual language that immediately screams Hillman, describing a dynamic campus full of students and different organizations.
“As Production Designer, my responsibility was to create the world that made all of that feel as though it belonged at Hillman,” he said. While art ties into Deborah Wayne’s story as an art major (following in her mother’s footsteps in the original), it also created a larger sense of cohesion and believability.
“In The Pit, we incorporated the work of Abdoulaye Ahmadu n’diaye, Sanford Green, Nandi Jordan, and Lisa Whittington. The artwork isn’t simply there to fill walls; it becomes part of Hillman’s contemporary cultural language and another layer of the institution we’re asking the audience to believe has continued living all these years.”
With that in mind, Jones explains what he wanted to accomplish in the season’s 10 episodes as viewers follow the characters on their freshman-year journey.
“The goal was never to suggest that every HBCU experience is the same. It was to take the richness we encountered across these institutions and allow Hillman to have a culture that feels specific to Hillman—a place with its own traditions, its own history, and its own visual memory.”
Read how hair stylist Derek Jae and costume designer Provi Fulp helped bring season one to life. Season one of A Different World is streaming on Netflix now.
Photo Credit: Netflix, Bruton Jones
