Fred’s Story: The Rise of Frederator

Infographic New Year’s poster for company

objective

Every year, CCO Fred Seibert sends out to the company as well his contacts a limited run of 300 New Year’s posters that are created by a different artist or designer. This year I was commissioned to illustrate the 2020 poster. My only requirement was to use a red, white, and black color palette.

solution

I worked closely with the CCO and the printer, Valhalla Studios, researching the history of the company, drafting a concept from said research, and illustrating and coloring the final poster.

As someone who has an interest in the use of diagrams, manual design, and infographics as narrative tools, I loved how the diagram of Timmy's head simply conveyed the message that he didn't have much on his mind.

So I thought about how could I make something similar for the poster. I started with a silhouette of the full Frederator robot and researched what made Frederator, Frederator and what built the Frederator reputation. The answer was obviously the evolution of Frederator's cartoons, duh! During my research, I observed how the creation of certain programming initiatives, directly and indirectly, resulted in many major successes in Frederator history.

For example, Oh Yeah! Cartoons was an incubator series that gave birth to The Fairly OddParents, ChalkZone, and My Life As A Teenage Robot. Thus these properties were placed in the heart and lungs since they are what gave life to the company.

I grouped Frederator's TV programming in the chest/stomach or core of the robot since traditional television is where we started. Next, I chose to group our YouTube accomplishments in the legs of the robot since we built the foundation of Frederator Digital on that platform. I reserved SVOD properties for the arms since they represent how we've reached out beyond TV and YouTube to streaming services (and many other endeavors).