The HA! logo.

HA! IDs 1990 for Fred/Alan from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Few designers understood Fred/Alan’s approach to television network logos as well as our first non-Fred, non-Alan creative director, Noel Frankel. 

Our point of view started to form after Frank Olinsky of Manhattan Design brought in the first iteration of the last presentation on the MTV logo. He thought that every usage of the logo (for shows, posters, ads, etcetera) should have a different illustrative approach. We then pushed that idea further and came up with the thought that there could be different logo variations working right next to each other in one piece. In a world where print designers were hired to come up with a trademark, and then motion graphic designers were brought in to “make it move,” Fred/Alan felt that television had become the primary platform for design, so the marks needed to take this fact into account. Build motion into the initial composition, don’t add it afterwards. Our feeling was that you could freeze any frame of our moving logos and use it as a print graphic. Tom Corey and Scott Nash at Corey, McPherson, Nash picked up on this as soon as we started working together, and embedded it into the Nickelodeon and Lifetime logos they did for us. Besides, we felt that a corporate logo would have hundreds of people messing with it anyway, so if we could come up with a way that each designer who worked with it over time could “own” their own designs, the usage of it would be exponentially more exciting.

Noel brought a level of conceptual and executional sophistication to the process that peaked with HA! A bit of background is in order.

In 1989, HBO announced The Comedy Channel as a basic cable offering that was meant to compete formatically and demographically with MTV. Having learned from Ted Turner’s Cable Music Channel that the best defense is a strong offense, MTV Networks quickly announced it’s own comedy network. Given our deep relationship as the original branders-in-chiefs for the company —and the incredible importance of brand establishment at this stage in cable television’s history— Fred/Alan was brought in immediately.*

Naming was the first challenge. Nickelodeon was named before there was even a company (or we would have come up with a better name), and naming MTV and VH-1 were completely driven by Bob Pittman’s focused leadership. So, for MTV Network’s comedy network the best creative minds in a highly creative company generated 400 names, no one could make a decision, so they asked us to come up with a name. Never ones to waste our time with a client who wouldn’t make up their minds, we decided the better part of valor would be to pick one from their list and sell it hard. HA!** was on the list, we loved it, and MTVN paid us a fortune to spend weeks convincing them a name on their own list was best. (So goes the game in corporate America.) 

Noel took it from there. He came up with an approach that allowed anyone who laughed to potentially be part of the network identity. A shouted “HA!” could emanate from anyone’s mouth, photographic or illustrative, and that would keep it fresh and allow for hundreds of fun network IDs.

Time was tight and the network needed to be on air by April 1, 1990 (get it?), a schedule twice as quick as the launch of MTV in 1981. Fred/Alan relied on producers we’d been working with over the past decade to produce the network ID packages, and they all jumped aboard and did some great work.

For those of you following our IDs for various networks during the 80s, most of these 10 second films won’t surprise. They were all good, but pay particular attention to the ones Drew Takahashi directed for his company (Colossal) Pictures (the X spots at the beginning of the compilation above). Always looking to innovate, Drew moved us away from the traditional 2D animation his company had done for us in the past and towards his passion of exploiting the then unique combination of video and computers. His pieces take the fun of Noel’s design and mashes them up with a number of television conventions from the vacuum tube days. Via early MacIntosh computers. 

HA! TV Comedy Network
Network identity IDs
Winter 1990

Logo design: Noel Frankel
Production: Drew Takahashi/(Colossal) Pictures SF, Alex Weil/Charlex NY, Marv Newland/International Rocketship Vancouver BC 

Produced by Albie Hecht, Howard Hoffman, Tom Pomposello, Chris Strand
Executive producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert

…..

* No, HA! doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the Comedy Channel. After two years of slugging it out with each other, they merged into Comedy Central (named by Fred/Alan’s Bill Burnett) as of April 1, 1991.

** The one hiccup in the clearance for the name was that Jim Henson had trademarked Ha! (executed in a Bodoni bold) for his company Henson Associates. Gerry Laybourne from Nickelodeon negotiated with Jim to make it work out.

“The greatest hits!! of music video!!!”

13 second video jingle VH-1 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was the network that had my clearest fingerprints all over it, and ultimately became one of the list of reasons I had for leaving the business. In any event, the era of the early 90s remains a personal favorite of mine. But, of course, I’m biased (or maybe it’s just my age).

No one knew what to do with VH-1.

“Video Hits One” didn’t work.

“The Other Music Television” didn’t work.

And “Baby Boomers Deserve Their Own Channel” didn’t work.

Time for some Fred/Alan rebranding.

Tom Freston and I were having a rare sit down outside the office one day in late 1990 lamenting what had crashed and burned at VH-1. Launched as a “fighting brand” to Ted Turner in 1985, the channel had limped along never quite finding it’s way. Don’t know what came over me —maybe it was the continuing strength of our hit invention at Nick-at-Nite— but I blurted out that the “solution” to VH-1 was oldies.

“Music video is just about 10 years old, so the oldest generation of video fans is already between 35 and 45 years old, VH-1’s target. These people have no interest in the newest hair bands, they want to hear the music they already liked and fit it into a soundtrack of their lives. And this generation were teenagers smack dab towards the end of fast talking DJs and zippity jingles. Let’s remix the golden age of Top 40 radio and MTV and turn the channel into ‘VH-1! The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!‘”

I’m not sure what came over Tom either, because he enthusiastically agreed and immediately cleared the way with management. We brought in a leading programming consultant, Fred Jacobs, who enthusiastically took to the idea and brought a lot of great ideas. We walked the entire staff through our point of view, and the reasoning behind it. As usual with a big organization, some people embraced the idea fully, and others were left grumbling (it wasn’t exactly the hippest solution, and MTV Networks was screaming with hipsters).

Creatively we went right to work, because there was a lot to do, and not much of a budget to do it with (remember, it’s not like the channel was in the greatest shape). The format was going to be like “hit radio”, with lots of announcer breaks (voice over only, no more VJs that no one liked), a half dozen “promise” tags (the station slogans), and, for me at least, the most fun was going to be using authentic Top 40 style radio jingles (more later). I enlisted Rowe Jones (we’d worked together on TV Heaven) to do an ungodly amount of daily work for us from his Florida studio; he would write, announce, and produce all the daily copy, and he became the voice of the network.

The jingles were going to be an interesting puzzle. No one on television had taken the 30 year, iconic sounds of hit radio and translated them, and while I thought the sound would be a slam dunk, the visuals were another matter entirely. At Fred/Alan we always thought the most provocative “look” of a network was actually driven through the aural passages, that television was, in fact, as much as an audio medium as visual. I went right the best source in the world, Jonathan and Mary Wolfert’s JAM Creative Productions in Dallas, Texas. Jon was crazy for the idea, and once we settled a few union singer residual issues, he dove right in, taking our dozen tags (from “the greatest hits!! of music video!!!” to “a-nother ow-er! of video pow-er!!!”) and constructing a classic sound with a totally 90s feel.

The video was trickier because what was a “video jingle” anyway? No one had done it before. Perceptual distinction was called for, certainly, but what did that mean? We went to two innovators for the answers. VMA winner Alex Weil at Charlex and Academy Award winner Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision. And over the Christmas/New Year’s holiday of 1990/91 they bum rushed the execution of flawless packaging for this sort of new channel.

Basically, the gig was like this: we had a number of different jingles, from three second “stingers” to 10+ second full chorus pieces. Both directors would use the exact same tracks, but lay over hundreds of video variations. There wasn’t exactly a budget for all that, but Alex and Zbig would develop a certain number foreground action with singers, dancers, and actors, and green screen as many backgrounds as could be afforded.


Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Charlex from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Charlex founders Charlie Levi and Alex Weil burst onto the scene with their 1984 sweep of the first VMAs (with Jeff Stein and my wife-to-be-10-years-later) for The Cars’ “You Might Think.” High profile assignments for SNL and Fred/Alan soon followed. We were all about the same age with parallel backgrounds and cultural influences (I knew we were in exactly the right place at our first meeting when Charlie made a crack about Fred Flintstone; very rare in the advertising world that someone would go so lowbrow). Fred/Alan actually became the Charlex ad agency in the late 80s. Nickelodeon, Myers’s Rum, and HA! saw some pretty good Fred/Alan-Charlex collabs, and we all had a great time doing it.

Alex Weil was the consummate confederate for VH-1. He had an awesome pop sensibility, but sometimes he wanted to think he was more sophisticated than that. A perfect conflict. And the clash was superbly matched to these jingles. Alex took to them in a heartbeat, reveling in the casting process and the dozens of different mix & match backgrounds he was going to put together with the logos.

My favorite accidental casting came about when Alan saw 1990s Miss Soviet Union and her runner up, beautiful blondes both, on David Letterman’s Late Night and got them over to Charlex the next day (the spot are in the package above). I’m sure they (or their handlers) had absolutely no idea what was going on or what they were lip syncing, but they were VH-1 stars for the next three years.


Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Zbigvision from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski was a surprise 1983 Oscar winner for his animated short “Tango and immediately picked shorts assignments for Lorne Michaels’ “The New Show” (where we were introduced by Colossal Pictures’ Lidia Przyluska) and then a whole passel of innovative conceptual music videos and films. Always pushing envelopes with technical R&D, by 1990 Zbig was one of the first directors dedicated to video composing using (then) rare HD video cameras from Sony.

Watching Zbig plan a shoot was a fascinating and often confusing experience. He didn’t make conventional storyboards, preferring to map out the mathematical components of his vision on graph paper. The VH-1 one project was no different. Polish born, he didn’t have any of the nostalgic feelings for the Top 40 style radio jingles that Alex, Alan, or I had; I’ve no idea if he even knew what they were. So, his vision was starker and weirder, not one bit pop (at least not what I was familiar with; people in potato sacks or pajama onsies?). But, the way we figured it, we had plenty of pop with Charlex, and the pieces were just a few seconds each. No one could really have enough time to hate them.

By the time he was done, I found Zbig’s pieces mesmerizing.

……
Alas, “The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!” was destined to be another in the long line of losing formats for VH-1. Our ratings improved dramatically for a little while (as all new VH-1 formats seemed to do) but really just sputtered along for most of it’s time on the air. I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t work, except that maybe our timing was off by maybe 15 years or so (music videos are the most popular film form on YouTube, the world most popular video player by a factor of 10), and it didn’t help that management was only going along because they’d been order to do so. Within a year they were continually undermining it, putting in their hipster touches all over the place. So, ultimately, it was, at best, an idea out of time, and at worst, just plain wrong. John Sykes came into the channel in 1994, hated (hated) the Greatest Hits, and instituted his “Music First” format. It crapped out too.

-Fred
…..
December 26, 1990 & January 4, 1991
Jingles produced by JAM Creative Productions, Dallas, Texas
Videos produced & directed by Alex Weil @ Charlex, NYC, and Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision, Hoboken, NJ
VH-1 logo: Scott Miller & Myles Tanaka
Executive Producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, Fred/Alan, Inc., New York

…..

VH-1 IDs Strategy Document 1990

Lifetime tries ‘Talk Television,’ 1984.

Lifetime IDs 1985 for Fred/Alan from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Tom Burchill had a good idea in 1984. Lifetime (the result of a merger between Cable Health Network and Daytime Television) would become “Talk Television”, the TV euqivalent of talk radio. The hosts would be everyone from Regis Philbin to Dr. Ruth. Good idea, poor execution, run by the wrong executives, who were still trying to make broadcast television, when cable had clearly morphed into something different. And even talk radio hadn’t yet supercharged into the conservative powerhouse Rush Limbaugh initiated in 1988.

But I enjoyed the work we did. Lifetime was our first Fred/Alan branded network after Nickelodeon, and the IDs were done with Corey McPherson Nash, Buzzco, Colossal Pictures, Olive Jar Productions. Tom Pomposello produced, and that’s Tina Potter as “the annoucer.”

(Tom Burchill recovered, I should hasten to add, when he dumped the talk format and Lifetime became the very successful “Television for Women.” We, alas, were not involved.)

Animation by Colossal Pictures, Buzzco Associates, Charlex, Olive Jar Studios, Filigree Films. 
Lifetime logo designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash, Corey McPherson Nash, Boston, Mass, USA

Nickelodeon goes to sleepaway camp, 1988-1990.

Nickelodeon Camp IDs 1988-1990 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Howard Hoffman is an artist and animation director who’d worked with Fred/Alan on a number of projects. One day he presented a zany idea. Howard spent Augusts at the Maine summer camp of his youth running an animation workshop, and wouldn’t it be better if the kids were animating something “real” like some Nickelodeon network IDs? That could be cool, right?

Well, sure. How bad could they be?

Not bad at all, it turned out; they were great. Howard made Nick IDs (and we filmed the kids introducing their shorts) for several years, and they were some of the best pieces we ever ran on the network.

The Myers’s Rum Video Network.

Illustrated by Joey Ahlbum

In 1986 music videos were still the coolest thing on earth and our friend Steve Dessau thought there was a way to make some money with them. Edgar Bronfman Jr. had just taken over his family’s liquor business and was obsessed with music (he’s now the CEO of the Warner Music Group). He was frustrated that liquor couldn’t use television to sell its wares and that he couldn’t take advantage of his favorite entertainment trend.

Who better to sell an idea to him than the only credible MTV guys who weren’t working at MTV (us)?

Partnering with Steve’s company (we set up a joint venture called Mystery Train Partners; see the business card below), we convinced Edgar Jr. that the Myers’s Rum Video Network could be his own “network” at the “video nightclubs” that were springing up around the country. It kind of worked.

Fred/Alan IDs for Myers’s Rum Video Network 1987 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Produced for Fred/Alan by Tom Pomposello; Executive producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert. Animation by Joey Ahlbum, Charlex, Alan Goodman, and Marv Newland/International Rocketship. Logo designed by Arlen Schumer.

Business card designed by Kathy Seibert Carey

Quick, kill Turner. VH-1: Video Hits One, 1985.

VH-1: Video Hits One IDs 1985 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The whole story of VH-1 is probably only interesting to those who lived it, given how non-interesting the network has been for most of it’s life, and we were involved from the beginning for almost 15 years. While Fred and Alan had left MTV 18 months before, they were still considered a vital part of the brain trust that could help launch networks at the company. Here’s a few notes on the network identity/branding work we did the first time out. In 1985.

Origin: Ted Turner decided that MTV played devil’s music (hey, Ted was little skewed in those days) and was going to launch an “acceptable” alternative. MTV Networks wasn’t going to lose the goose that laid the golden egg and decided to fight Ted playing his own game. (In 1982, when ABC annouced a competing cable news service, Turner put CNN2, now Headline News, on the air within weeks and crushed ABC.) We strategized and executed the company’s second music network within weeks.

The name: Our boss, programming head Bob Pittman, was annoyed that his team rejected his pet name for MTV, TV-1, on the grounds that no one had a “1” on their TVs (remember, in 1981, people still had TV dials that went from channel 2 to channel 13). By 1985 he was powerful enough that the new music channel became, by his decree, VH-1: Video Hits One.

The programming: The programming needed to be available, inexpensive, and seemingly popular. Oh, and it couldn’t “cannibalize” MTV’s viewers. So, it would be poisitioned as music video for an older group (MTV was for folks 12 to 34 years old), 25 to 49 years old. Less rock and more pop. In reality, it meant any darn music videos MTV wouldn’t touch.

The logo & network IDs: My mentor Dale Pon and his partner, ad legend George Lois, had done the iconic “I Want My MTV” advertising, so George was asked to design the logo. Having not one pop music vein in his body, we got what we got.

Fred/Alan gathered up our most reliable animation collaborators, and churned out as many IDs as we could in four weeks (not easy with traditional cell animation and 1980s motion graphics). IDs that wouldn’t seem like they “belonged” on MTV. In other words, have fun, but not too much fun. As you can hear on the last pieces, it was the beginning of our Top 40 radio jingles era.

Animation by Buzzco & Colossal Pictures. Jingles by JAM. Logo by George Lois.

The doo-wopping of television, 1984-1992.

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

The Jive 5 on Nickeldeon from fredseibert on Vimeo

Eugene Pitt and The Jive 5 were as perfect an element of network identity as Fred/Alan ever found. All the filmmakers who worked with us on Nickelodeon lined up to be the first to use their soundtracks on their network IDs.

The Fred/Alan television branding execution often started with defining a network’s sound. A background in music and radio made this logical for them, though it was a philosphy grounded in their belief that TV was driven by the sounds first, with the visuals often following the audio lead. In the case of the Nickelodeon rebranding in 1985 the time frame was short, under six months, so the audio and the visual identities were developed simultaneously.

For over a year Alan and Fred had been thinking about old radio jingles, and thinking of ways to incorporate a human, vocal sound on their identities. In 1983, working on The Playboy Channel’s Hot Rocks, they scouted around for an a cappella group to record distinctive IDs for the music video show. Alan’s former colleague, writer and producer Marty Pekar, had started Ambient Sound to capture contemporary recordings of classic doo-wop groups from the 50s and 60s. He introduced them to the leader of The Jive 5, Eugene Pitt, as “not only a great singer, but a smart man.” They found Eugene to be, as Rock and Roll Hall of Fame CEO Terry Stewart said, “the most underrated soul singer in America,” and a wonderful collaborator. When the opportunity to work with Nickelodeon presented itself, Fred, Alan, and producer Tom Pomposello immediately knew the Jive 5 would be the perfect underpinning for defining the vocabulary of the network.

Convincing Nickelodeon was another story. When we brought up the notion of a sound identity, Nickelodeon executives, still not fully understanding of where we intended to steer the channel, suggested a consideration of Raffi, then a recent phenomenon as a singer for young children. “He’s very popular; our research confirms it.” Fred/Alan tried a lot of arguments to bring them around to a doo-wop sound, but they fell on deaf ears. “Doo-wop’s 30 years old, no kid has ever heard of it.”

Frame grab from “The Jive Five”, by Jon Kane/Optic Nerve

We won the day on two grounds.

Fred played on the executives’ liberal backgrouds. “We love all forms of African-American music, and using doo-wop will be a great way to educate American kids without anyone being the wiser.”

Alan’s worked even better. He opened his mouth and, quoting The Marcels’ arrangement of chestnut “Blue Moon,” sang:

“Bom-ma-bom, a-bom-bom-a-bom, ba-ba-bom-bom-a-bomp, b-dang-a-dang-dang, b-ding-a-dong-ding.”

“What kid isn’t going to relate to that right away?” Alan asked.

Case closed.

Animation by Eli Noyes & Kit Laybourne, Joey Ahlbum, Colossal Pictures, David Lubell, Jerry Lieberman & Kim Deitch, Marv Newland/International Rocketship, and Jon Kane/Optic Nerve. Additional singing by Juli Davidson, and Paul Rolnick.

The Nickelodeon logo, designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

Nickelodeon Logo Logic   Designed by Sheri Dorr & Laurie Kelliher   Creative Director: Scott Webb

Tom Corey, Scott Nash, and Alan Goodman are the key guys in the Nickelodeon logo saga.

Back in the day my partner Alan Goodman and I were known as the logo guys. It was both flattering and annoying, because we’re not designers and it deflected attention from the brilliant people we worked with often, like Manhattan Design (Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman, and Patti Rogoff designed MTV’s logo) and Corey & Co. (who designed Nickelodeon’s). But after we became known as the group who developed (not designed) the MTV logo, our reps were set in stone for a while. Eventually we were able to morph it into the idea of developing media brands, which more accurately reflected how Alan and I thought of ourselves.

After setting the vocabulary (more important than design in many ways) and “look” of MTV Alan and I left MTV Networks to set up our independent Fred/Alan Inc. and our first client was… MTV Networks. By 1984, the five year old Nickelodeon was in trouble, having lost an accumulated $40 million (that’s in 1980’s money, like $200 million today) and worse, it was the absolute lowest rated cable network in America. Dead last. MTVN chief Bob Pittman asked Alan and I to help. It was a tough decision for us to make since we were broke but had no interest in children’s television or the people who worked in it. The ‘broke’ part won out.

The key decisions we made:

• Keep the name “Nickelodeon.” We figured that 10,000,000 kids (there current circulation) knew the name and what it stood for. Management wanted to switch to “Nick,” since it was easier to spell and say; let’s forget that everyone outside the company would wonder why they were named after a garage mechanic. There were a lot of reasons for killing it: no one under a certain age had ever heard of a nickelodeon, and those who had knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with children; the word was hard to spell correctly in the age of pre-Google and spellcheck; and, the word was way too long and thin to dominate a television screen.

• Treat the network like an exclusive club, where only kids could join, not like a TV station with all kids shows. Kids in June of 1984 (when we started work) needed something they could call their own. They felt on the rear end of life, they told us so constantly. Adults (parents and teachers) made all the decisions for them. TV in the 80s wasn’t for them. They were scared of getting older, but their unconscious biology kept egging them on to age faster.

• Ban the word “FUN” from the Nickelodeon vocabulary. Every network promo told the kids that Nickelodeon was fun. It wasn’t. We thought it was better to be “fun” than say “fun.”

• Redesign the logo. Famous television designer, a moonlighting Lou Dorfsman, had designed the logo in 1981, and our brilliant friend Bob Klein had added a silver ball that zoomed around the screen in and out of everything a kid might find exciting.

Alan and I didn’t find it exciting. We’d been working a lot with a new friend, Tom Corey, who owned Corey & Co. (tragically, Tom’s passed away, his companies are now called Corey McPherson Nash & Big Blue Dot) in Boston. He came down to the Fred/Alan office in New York with his partner Scott Nash and heard our pitch for the network. we told them about our decisions I talked about above, and told them while we didn’t know anything about kids’ programming we knew that the offices of Nickelodeon were as quiet as a chapel (as one of the internal wags put it) and that in order to spice the place up we hoped that when our jobs were done they’d all be shooting spitballs at each other. Tom and Scott dug in eagerly.

I wish I had their presentation. It was pretty informal —a bunch of logos sketched on a page— and none any of us were all that crazy about. Eventually, we settled on one that was 3D in nature that revolved around itself, and kind of a standard designer treatment of a trademark. We were about to settle when Alan spoke up and said he didn’t think it was in keeping with our reputation as moving image thinkers about logos.

The MTV logo had been sold in with two thoughts. 1) Rock’N’Roll was a dynamic constantly changing medium and a logo should have a built in updating mechanism. And 2) More importantly, television was moving pictures. Logos were generally designed by print designers who wanted a perfect image, then handed off to moving image designers who had to figure out how to make the damn thing move. Often, it ended up with a big hunk of metal hurtling through space, cause what else were they going to do? We’d argued that in the 1980s that was a dumb thing to do. Why not just design a logo with movement baked into the conceptual frame right from the beginning? TV was the most important place to see the logo, and print designers could just *STOP* the motion and pick an image for an ad; it would be more dynamic even in the print that way.

Alan pointed out that’s how we’d made our bones, and besides were right, darn it. Movement was the way to go, constant change made for a energetic network, and kids were the most vital force in the world. Give them something they relate to: change. He was looking at the orange splat on their page. Tom and Scott argued that orange generally clashed with everything and that would make the logo stand out (as long as we didn’t let designers try and make it work “correctly.”) The splat could morph into any image we liked. And it wasn’t the MTV version of change. I came along for the ride that Tom, Scott, and Alan were proposing, and we trucked over to Bob Pittman’s and Gerry Laybourne’s office to make the pitch.

Bob and Gerry didn’t buy it. No one else there did either. “It doesn’t match anything.” “It’s flat.” “It’s not as cool as the MTV logo, what happened to you guys?”

Ultimately, we prevailed. I’m not really sure how, since all their objections were right on. But we were the “logo guys,” so they eventually bought our action. I’m thrilled they did, since our work with Nickelodeon is some of my favorite stuff in our careers. Tom and Scott went on to be among the premiere designers in television and kids (Scott’s now one of the leading children’s book authors and illustrators), Alan’s a successful producer and brand strategist (still consulting Nickelodeon), and they all deserved the accolades the world could throw at them.

(By the way, the book Nickelodeon Logo Logic was put together in 1998 by Sheri Dorr and Laurie Kelliher at their in-house creative services department after Alan and I had stopped full time consulting to the company six years before. The company had expanded so dramatically and so many people had trademark needs that without us —the “logo police”— around Nick’s Worldwide Creative Director Scott Webb needed some objective rules set down for designers and marketers to follow. I’m not so sure we’d agree with all their points but a trademark is a dynamic thing. Different people interpret it different ways, kind of like a musical composition, and it’s natural it’ll be looked at in new ways over the years.)

Update, 2010:

• Nickelodeon discontinued use of this logo after 26 years. They call it a “rebranding.” We would probably beg to differ.

• On his website, advertising executive George Lois claims to have designed the Nickelodeon logo. Since Fred/Alan developed the logo directly with Tom Corey and Scott Nash, his assertion is clearly false.

—Fred Seibert, 2009

Fred/Alan plays with Nickelodeon.

Fred/Alan worked with Nickelodeon from 1984 through 1992 as brand, marketing, and programming consultants, as their advertising agency, and through it’s Chauncey Street Productions subsidiary (managing director: Albie Hecht), as television producers.

Alan has continued to consult and produce for Nickelodeon. Fred produces cartoons and consults for the network. Albie became Nick’s President of TV & FIlm Production for many years and now produces TV shows for them too.

N’awlins and Minnesota?

Fred/Alan IDs 1989 featuring Dr. John for TV Heaven from fredseibert on Vimeo.

After Tom Pomposello introduced us to Fred Mogubgub’s pop-art style for the TV Heaven/Channel 41 station IDs, our creative department researched a series of ‘heaven’ quotations which would be read by actors for the animation soundtracks.

In another life Fred/Alan Managing Director Ed Levine (now a famous food writer) had co-produced two amazing records by New Orleans stylist Dr. John (real name Mac Rebennack) and had convinced him to play our annual holiday parties.  Ed reminded us Mac was singing commercials (for their big payday) and thought he might do us a favor and put one of the appropriate quotes to music to give the campaign a little flavor.

Session arrangements were made and Ed and our production team went over to the studio for what we thought we be a normal three hour session with Mac singing and playing solo piano. A little over an hour later they were back in the office doors. We were shocked and concerned they were back so fast; what had gone wrong?!

As often happens with magic talent at the right moment, nothing had gone wrong and everything had gone amazingly right. Mac had taken a look at the lyrics we’d prepared, with the syllables’ rhythm worked out perfectly, and come up with a melody that fit 10 seconds in about…10 seconds! He’d asked for other lyrics and we put everything we had in front of him whether they “worked” or not. One by one, with over a dozen set of lyrics, Mac ran them down in real time, and before our team knew it, he’d sung every word we had. All of a sudden we’d almost doubled our ID output, and with a N’awlins joie de vivre at that.

We eventually used visuals from all of our contributors — Fred Mogubgub, International Rocketship, Mark Karzen, Mark Beyer, and others from our agency creative team— with the unique soundtracks Dr. John provided us.