Essay #2 from The Art of HA!
(“The Art of HA!” is #16 in the FredFilms Professional Library, with several hundred images, is at Amazon.com and can be previewed here.)
By 1990, Alan Goodman and I had already learned a few things the hard way.
At Fred/Alan, we were creative directors, responsible for shaping the thinking, assembling the right creative partners, and creating the conditions in which the work could behave the way television demanded. Our job was to lead the effort, protect the idea, and know when to push it further.
The distinction mattered.
Television had already taught us that traditional graphic design logic, rooted in print, permanence, and singular form. broke down in a moving medium. Logos didn’t just need to reproduce well. They needed to perform. They had to live in time, sound, motion, and repetition. They had to survive being interrupted, reinterpreted, and sometimes abused.
That way of thinking didn’t begin with HA!. The initial visual spark came from Manhattan Design, Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman, and Patti Rogoff, whose early explorations gave us the confidence to imagine a single logo expressed through multiple graphic treatments. Not variations over time, but differences appearing almost simultaneously, sometimes within the same filmed piece.
That was a critical leap.
We saw it clearly in the work Tom Corey and Scott Nash did for Nickelodeon, the orange logo that could change shape, texture, and context without losing its identity. That work helped crystallize something important for us: a television logo didn’t need one design. It needed a point of view.
HA! gave us the opportunity to apply that thinking to comedy.
Comedy doesn’t repeat itself cleanly. Laughter overlaps. It interrupts. It arrives early or late or too loud.
Luckily for Fred/Alan, MTV Networks' CEO Tom Freston, and Nickelodeon's Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece (they were running the comedy operation), let our heads run wild with the same creative assurance that original president Bob Pittman had granted us.
After a to and fro with management at MTV Networks, Fred/Alan convinced them that the HA! name –which was one of a few hundreds that had been brainstormed– was a natural. More friendly tussling with the [Jim] Henson Associates, the graphic work started.
The HA! logo was designed by Noel Frankel, Fred/Alan’s in-house creative and art director.
Noel shared our instincts that logos had to feel like a sound. A physical act. Something that came out of a mouth. And like us and all our other OG designers, Noel was marinated in Andy Warhol’s multiples; he even hung Andy's anti-Nixon print from 1972 in his home.
The letters lean.. Perspective is exaggerated. The exclamation point isn’t punctuation, it’s thrust.
Faces, background and colors refuses to settle. The mark changes because laughter changes.
Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s abrasive. Sometimes it’s awkward or dumb.
Our role was to insist that it stay that way.
HA! didn’t last long enough to become familiar. It never had time to harden into rules or brand standards. In a way, that preserved the work.
What remains is a brief moment when television branding was still discovering that identity could be elastic, plural, and kinetic by design.
The network disappeared. The work went into boxes. The tapes aged. But the idea –that television brands are authored through direction, collaboration, and motion– didn’t disappear with it.
This book exists to document that moment. Not as nostalgia. Not as a corporate origin story. But as evidence of how we believed television identities should be made: by assembling the right people, giving them a shared sensibility, and directing the work so it could move honestly inside the medium it was meant for.
The Designer and the Filmmakers The Fred/Alan approach to television logo design –the initial design itself should be constructedto anticipate the fact the TV is a motion picture medium– was not particularly new. The CBS “Eye” blinked, after all. But, over the decades this approach was hijacked by designers steeped in centuries old static, print-style thinking. Luckily, we had the great luck to work with Manhattan Design for MTV: Music Television and Corey & Co. for Nickelodeon. And, at Fred/Alan, we had the great fortune to have a forward thinking Noel Frankel in our corner.
As daring as the static designs could be –at HA! Noel changed out the human laughing, the backgrounds, but a human, its laugh lines, and the shadowed logotype were the given elements– for us, it was the animation production shops that brought things to life.
Like with the rare, maverick graphic designers with whom we collaborated, Fred/Alan was interested in filmmaking auteurs, individually conceiving their films based on the minimal parameters –the logo design, the 10-second lengths– we provided. They would take
the givens and then fold, twist and mutilate them in increasingly unique and inventive ways.
(I hasten to add that for all of the attention given to the way we played with graphic marks, that design wasn’t sufficient to define “the brand.” It never is.)
Noel Frankel, Fred/Alan Creative Director, designer of the HA! logo
Noel Frankel Fred/Alan had been primarily a media branding and promotion company with clients like Nickelodeon, Showtime and MTV. That all changed when Nick needed an ad agency and one thing led to another and we became the full service advertising agency for all of MTV Networks in America.
Now, we needed some folks who had actually worked in actual advertising.
First up was Ed Levine. We knew Ed from the music business and we shared a love of jazz, blues and soul. He’d also come off of a stint at the giant J.Walter Thompson agency and needed an escape from promoting hemorrhoid creams. Ed in turn introduced us to Noel Frankel.
Noel was a rebel, who rebelled with his incisive writing and art direction at every advertising agency you could name. He too wanted a respite from the same old same old. And boy, did he find it at Fred/Alan. Beginning with making famous the cable TV channel we had literally created, Nick-at-Nite:
“Be Donna Reed! In less than two hours a day!”
"Darrin Stephens – you've just been chosen Ad Man of the Year!"
“WIN! A Mr. Ed Blow Up Doll!”
Noel intuitively understood the media environment we had helped to create and dove in with both feet. His first moving logo for us was with The Movie Channel, where he took “the eyes are the window to the soul” as a metaphor to the purpose of films. Noel’s pièce de résistance was HA! The TV Comedy Network.
A simple classic design, structured for change, clarity and distinction. Fixed elements that would always make it recognizable, but flexible enough that every designer, producer and filmmaker could make it their own.
Charlex Probably the most revolutionary producers of motion graphics and commercials towards the end of the 20th Century were Charlex, Charlie Levi and Alex Weil.
Revolutionary? From the dawn of film, pretty much all motion graphics were done on, duh, film. As television dawned there were some experiments in video, but they remained the rare exceptions.
Then Charlex came along and used video in ways that had never been imagined. They took the 1981 Quantel Digital Paint Box away from the engineers that pioneered it and taught graphic artists how to use the technology for flights of fantasy.
Of course, it wasn’t the technology that spoke. It was the Charlex unlimited imaginations that won the day with us. By the time HA! came along, we’d done enough work together that it was enough to tell them “keep the logo on the screen for at least three seconds. You figure out the rest.”
(Colossal) Pictures (Colossal) Pictures, in their decade of work with us at MTV: Music Television and Nickelodeon, had used their eloquent, explosive talents and skills of the company's artistic crews in every form of filmmaking they would set their minds to. When HA! came along, co-founder Drew Takahashi was obsessed with putting Apple Macintosh computers on each and every animation desk in the joint. He wanted HA! to be one of their commercial projects to experiment with video filmmaking.
Colossal defined the West Coast studio model at full scale, operating less as a single aesthetic than as a creative ecosystem capable of absorbing animation, live action, visual effects, and emerging technologies. Founded by Gary Gutierrez and Drew in San Francisco, Colossal thrived on collaboration and stylistic multiplicity, pairing experimental ambition with industrial capacity and helping legitimize the idea that motion graphics and animation could function as acomprehensive production culture rather than a boutique specialty.
We asked the shop to be the earliest MTV: Music Television collaborators, telling them that aside from the minimum three of 10 seconds our logo needed to be on the screen, we just wanted them to make such great work that they would be forced to open their sample reels with the work. They responded with joyous enthusiasm, stylistic and conceptual innovation.
For 10 years, Colossal was our mainstay on everything we made for our television clients like HA!
Jerry Lieberman Productions & Lou Brooks Jerry Lieberman was a mainstay of our work formany years at The Movie Channel, MTV and Nickelodeon, and a natural for HA! He was friends with some great illustrators and thought Lou Brooks would be perfect for us. We quickly agreed.
Lou was an influential American illustrator, cartoonist, and author known for his "lowbrow" comic book aesthetic and bold, precise line work. He’s often credited with bridging the gap between commercial advertising and the nostalgic iconography of mid-20th-century pop culture.
Lou wanted HA! To reflect some of his novelty vaudeville obsessions, the kind of comedy gags that would always elicit groans. “X-Ray Specs,” “Whoopee Cushion,” “Itching Powder” and the classic “Exploding Cigar.” His illustrations were period perfect, leaning into that "pulp" aesthetic by using bold outlines and a limited color palette that mirrored the cheap, high-contrast printing of old comic book advertisements. Jerry’s tradition, hand drawn, cel animation –almost the polar opposite of the video work done by Charlex and [Colossal]– and Fred/Alan’s Tom Pomposello’s spot on soundtracks made the entire series unforgettable.
Marv Newland, International Rocketship Marv Newland is a one of a kind artist and animated filmmaker. Traditional and experimental, smart and lowbrow, an avant-gardist who makes films for everyone to enjoy. His film festival shorts made him world famous, but he took commercial assignments when they sparked his fancy.
Marv worked with Fred/Alan a lot. His films were infused with an almost avant-garde anarchy, while retaining their commercial imperatives. Perfect for us! The more Marv created, the more we’d want.
He conceived his pieces from scratch, designed most of them himself, oversaw their scores, and animated, directed and produced. At HA! his five pieces take good ol’ fashioned cel animation and constantly subverted expectations, often turning things literally upside down.
#16 The FredFilms Professional Library
