Club opened the opportunity for Nickelodeon and Rainbow to collaborate on additional co-productions together, including various pilots from 2014 onward and Club 57 in 2019. Retooled eighth season The eighth season of the series was not produced immediately after the seventh. It followed a multiple-year hiatus and was not made as a direct continuation of the previous season. At Iginio Straffi's decision, Season 8 was heavily retooled to appeal to a preschool target audience. For season 8, Rainbow's creative team restyled the characters to appear younger, hoping to increase the appeal toward preschoolers. The plot lines were simplified so that they could be understood by a younger audience. Most of the show's longtime crew members were not called back to work on this season, including art director Simone Borselli, who had designed the series' characters from season 1 to 7, and singer Elisa Rosselli, who had performed a majority of the songs. In another change from previous seasons, Nickelodeon's American team served as consultants rather than directly overseeing the episodes; at the time, Nickelodeon was instead working with Rainbow on a new co-production, Club 57. Season 8 was also the first-ever season without the involvement of Rai Fiction. Iginio Straffi made the decision to shift the show's intended audience after years of gradually aiming toward a younger demographic. In a 2019 interview, Straffi explained that decreasing viewership from older viewers and an increased audience of young children made this change a necessity. He elaborated that "the fans of the previous Winx Club say on social media that the new seasons are childish, but they don't know that we had to do that." Straffi stepped away from the series at this time and did not oversee season 8's production like he had for the previous installments. He instead shifted his focus to live-action projects aimed at older audiences: Nickelodeon's Club 57 and Fate: The Winx Saga. Straffi explained that "the things we had to tone down [in season 8] have been emphasized in the live action–the relationships, the fights, the love stories." He added that he hopes that Fate will satisfy the "20-year-olds who still like to watch Winx." Production Design The series' visuals are a mixture of Japanese anime and European elements, which Iginio Straffi calls "the trademark Rainbow style". The main characters' original designs were based on Straffi's original sketches and later updated to 3D CGI iterations. The main