The Gretel team had to come up with an innovative and appealing way to bring all of Nick Jr.’s favorite and familiar offerings – Dora the Explorer, Team Umizoomi, Max & Ruby, Diego, Bubble Guppies – into a single, united look and feel. Gretel also brought Nick Jr.’s brand into alignment with the more modern sensibility of Nickelodeon’s other brands.
The team took the new network tagline: “The smart place to play” literally, and set out to design that very place. Gretel combined elements and characters from the diverse group of familiar shows into a striking world of curvilinear shapes and numbers, all interconnected by winding pathways. The rebrand seamlessly blends the network’s live action, animated, and 3D offerings into a colorful, engaging, and sensory environment of creative search and discovery.
The overall design owes some of its inspiration to the eclectic post-modern style known as “Memphis,” an aesthetic whose flagrant rule-breaking in using wildly disparate colors, shapes, patterns, and prints was popular during the 1980’s.
To create the inclusive and engaging world, the Gretel team relied on a combination of Cinema 4D software for 3D design and animation, and Adobe After Effects for rotoscoping and compositing. The result is a visually striking and deeply memorable vision for the future of the Nick Jr. brand.