2001 – RobWinfield

June 24, 2019June 19, 2020

CES Today

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

Back in 2001, the annual Consumer Electronics Show was the ultimate tech-fetish fest for the latest and greatest offerings of gear and gadgets. It was also considered one of TechTV’s major newsworthy events.

TechTV on-air personalities provided extensive floor coverage of the convention, offering exclusive in-depth interviews with developers and CEO’s, as well as awarding “best-of” accolades for all the show-stopping services and products.

For the concept and visual design, the process started with a barcode, a piece of printed technology branded on every consumer product. Through a freeform exploration of image and motion, the barcode was extrapolated ultimately into the show’s identity and branding.

Consequently, this resulted more in playful eye-candy than high-concept metaphor. But given that it’s basically a news magazine one-off, that proved to be completely appropriate.

June 24, 2019June 19, 2020

Big Thinkers

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE | PROMO
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

This show package was designed for TechTV’s slick and cerebral 2001 documentary about contemporary futurists, scientists, pioneers and artists. “Big Thinkers” profiled such people as author Douglas Adams, entertainer Penn Jilette, futurist Alvin Toffler, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, and former FCC chairman Michael Powell, to name a few.

From a design perspective, the visual component needed to be contemporary and classy, full of metaphor, yet equally straightforward.

This lead to the concept of a waterdrop to symbolize an idea’s birth. As the drop falls, the impact results in expanding ripples, each circular wave representing different disciplines of thought: science, art, philosophy, metaphysics, universal consciousness, etc.

Pretentious, yes. But most appropriate, given present company.

June 24, 2019June 19, 2020

Darwination

BROADCAST: NETWORK IDENTITY STATION ID
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

“Darwination” is the very first animated piece I designed for TechTV. And it was done in an afternoon, while waiting for my first official assignment.

The animation, of course, was a different, lengthier story. The assembly and creation took the better part of a couple of months, on and off, since this wasn’t an officially sanctioned project. It was one of those, “When you have spare time, why not create a station ID.” So when time permitted, I threw as much effort as I could at it. At times, it was a lot. At others, very little. And fortunately, due to a lack of deadline, I had enough room to explore as many ideas as possible.

Inspired by the illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the central concept focuses on a metaphorical representation of the primordial soup, where technology first swims in the muck, then through organic evolution, grows into more complex and structured shapes, until it eventually takes flight as a sentient creature.

“Darwination” was awarded a BDA Bronze Award in the category of In-House On-Air Station ID.

June 24, 2019June 13, 2020

Titans of Tech

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Senior Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

During the technology industry’s peak at the turn of the millennium, tech tycoons like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a handful of others were leading the charge. To chronicle their achievements, former tech-centric network TechTV commissioned the weekly biography show “Titans of Tech.”

Capturing the essence of these captains of industry lent itself to a typographic approach for the show’s graphic design. Words, both descriptive and defining, were chosen to characterize the personalities of those leaders being portrayed.

Much like an infinite crossword puzzle, these words snake and slide into view, forming a grid of intensifying descriptive language. As more words enter the grid, they begin to form the faces of these iconic titans, until only faces comprised of the data-matrix remain.

To accomplish this, the words were individually animated to travel along the grid, with grayscale values of the positive and negative spaces used to create the facial definition of the featured individual. At the time, my skill at coding expressions wasn’t advanced enough to achieve the given effect procedurally. So I settled for the old-school frame-by-frame approach to the animation. Time consuming, but effective.