The Brand (Cartoons!)
Cartoons are fun! Cartoon Network is hip—as popular with people in their twenties as it is with kids. I work with creative people who are really passionate about what they do.
Design
Working for a trendy entertainment brand with a ton of great content means that you end up designing some fun stuff. From a design perspective this doesn't make things any easier, though. Of course we get to find creative ways of integrating sophisticated animation and humor into interactive designs, but these are still complex design challenges with multiple business goals and even more stakeholders.
Our sites, games, and other interactive pieces are companion pieces to the on-air television experience. We work closely with show teams to create relevant and exclusive online content with elements from specific episodes. Sites have to be quickly and easily updated to stay topical, with new content for each new episode. Games and promotions have to be true to the spirit of the shows, and the way we use the characters needs to feel true as well. This means that, yes occasionally I get paid to watch cartoons—to help determine the look and feel of my designs, of course.
CartoonNetwork.com has millions of users around the world visiting the site every week. They come—and more importantly, keep coming back—because we have hundreds of games and videos. That hasn't changed (much) over the course of my time here, but the amount of content is one of the few things that isn't different from year to year. Technology, users, business models, shows, advertisers, design trends—all of these things change.
Cartoon's core demographic is kids aged six to eleven, with older kids (nine to fourteen) and younger kids (two to five) a secondary focus. This means that in my time at Cartoon, a six year old at the bottom end of our demo aged out of the primary focus, and the six year old who replaced him is getting ready to age out soon. Our audience creates usability challenges—a six year old is a completely different person than an eleven year old. This is coupled with the additional challenge of designing interfaces or branding that feels young—aimed at a seven or eight year old—that are dismissed by them as being "for babies."
Needless to say, the site is constantly changing. We rebuilt the site from top to bottom—completely changing the architecture inside and out—at least five times in the last ten years.
{Cool Stuff
If you watch the network now—or watched at any point over the time I've been a graphic designer there—you know we produced some really cool stuff. Adventure Time is as big a cultural phenomenon as almost anything else on television right now. Adult Swim is continuing to produce some of the weirdest stuff on any network.
Brands with this sort of cultural cachet partner with other great brands. Meaning I got to work on a ton of great stuff that isn't just Cartoon Network. I led the design on show launches for both Star Wars: The Clones Wars and Dreamworks' Dragons. I designed and art directed work for LEGO for years, including partnerships, show promotions, games, and a ton of other stuff.
As often as I can, I remind my colleagues that our jobs aren't like regular people's. Here's a quick sampling of some random fun stuff I did during the last ten years...
A Gallery Exhibition
The Museum of Design Atlanta opened their space for Cartoon to put on a exhibition of our design work: Design At Play. The installation also involved us branding the space—painting the walls, the pedestals displaying the work. I designed and animated screen savers for kiosks displaying games and other interactive designs.
Sports Inspired Team Identities
I helped design identities for teams of vikings, robots, and other cool things as a part of an afternoon programming block. Kids watched vikings fight robots, pirates against elephants, each with hordes of color coded ninjas doing battle over which cartoon should be on after school that day.
Cartoon Network DNA
I designed the "Change Your DNA" application for the Profile section of CartoonNetwork.com. This is the place on our site where kids customize their profile. The interface is a fun and easy way for our brand to represent what our users are interested in.
I illustrated, designed, and art directed over one hundred DNA icons, each representing something a user might like to do, play, eat, etc. The style of these was developed by the on-air group, but I expanded the twenty or so they created into a comprehensive set.
Cartoon Corporate Identities
I got to design corporate identities for Dexter and Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory for a massive online game. They put these things on robots and other fun parts of a 3D world!
