NEW YORK — Gretel (www.gretelny.com) has just completed a rebrand of Nick Jr., coinciding with the retirement of animated hosts Moose and Zee. The channel is aimed at kids three to seven years old, whose interests and skills are constantly evolving.
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.