September 2009
10 posts
1 tag
My mentors: Nick Moy
Nick Moy, New York City, circa 1975
To call such a buddy a “mentor” might seem an overstatement (he’ll probably find it silly), but it’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be in the career I have without Nick Moy.
The son of two pharmacists, I entered school planning on a career as a chemist. Six weeks in I turned to my lab partner and said, “I like the Beatles...
5 tags
My mentors: Ralph Ginzburg (?)
Click here to read this ad larger.
It’s hard to call Ralph Ginzburg a mentor of mine. I’m not sure he talked to me more than once, and after a few months on the night shift at his magazine Moneysworth, he had me fired. But a mentor to me he indeed was. Without either of us knowing it, the path I started at Ralph’s would continue for 15 years.
By the time I went to work for his...
8 tags
MTV: Music Television, The Logo
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The “first MTV logo, designed by Manhattan Design The mutating MTV logo, 1981, designed by Manhattan Design, New York
I was the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television, joining the parent company (then called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company) May 5, 1980. My boss, Bob Pittman asked me to oversee all of the original...
10 tags
Ten years after: The MTV logo examined.
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“Over the Edge with MTV” It’s funny, but for all the influence the MTV graphics have had, not much has been written about them. Probably because we were all media people, rather than directly from the graphic design community, we never really worked the press on behalf of ourselves.
But the Oscar winning animator Jon Canemaker is also...
10 tags
The evolution of a famous logo.
Click here for my other posts about MTV. Jon Canemaker’s 1992 article on MTV’s graphic design included some of the original logo development I had forgotten about for 30 years, and it makes a nice companion to my first logo post. My creative partner Alan Goodman and I were interviewed, as was the Manhattan Design group that created the logo in the first place. Also, the teams put...
9 tags
The MTV Network IDs.
Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, MTV IDs 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo. Here’s a compilation of the very first two years of MTV animated logos.
From the minute I went to work for Bob Pittman (he was 25, I was 27) at the Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company in May of 1980, he told me about the company’s plan for a television channel that would be exclusively rock videos and how...
5 tags
The very first MTV T-shirt.
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“You’ll never look at music the same way again.”
Everything’s always hard at a start-up. Even T-shirts. Believe it or not, even at MTV.
The first time doing everything is torture, and in an organization, it’s organizational torment. No matter who’s in charge of what, everyone wants a say in everything. After all, we...
14 tags
More than 75,000 times.
Click here for my posts about MTV.
This post is about two animated spots during MTV’s first year. One’s the most popular, the other was only played once, and not on television. “One Small Step” from fredseibert on Vimeo.
There were very few “ideas” for spots I could claim as mine at MTV. Identifying talent and strategy were my strengths, and I felt from...
7 tags
The first MTV bumper sticker.
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I came upon this photo on Flickr of the first MTV bumper sticker (part of a 1981 pre-launch promotional package that included a duffel bag, poster, buttons, and this) and a few trivia things about pricked by attention, completely aside from the fact that it was ‘the first.’
The first approved MTV logo design & colors
• The logo:
Like...
10 tags
Click here for my posts about MTV.
On May 5, 1980 I lucked into my first job in television —cable television— at Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC). Within 30 days programming head Bob Pittman started putting together the team to launch ‘The Music Channel’ (the working name for what eventually became MTV) and had me add to my existing duties as the head...