Dewey Reid writes:
Well, it’s a long, strange journey. It’s about a 45-year-plus journey. So right out of high school, I went to work for a place called The Peanut Gallery. The Peanut Gallery was all the artists of the ‘60s. It was Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse & Kelley, and the ZAP Artista group. I ended up doing Grateful Dead T‑shirts and design pieces like that. I was working and going to college and taking classes. I was taking animation classes. I took theater classes because I really liked film and I thought theater would be a good thing to learn.
I got a chance to study under a famous watercolorist in Hawaii named Richard Moore. I was in Hawaii for a year and a few months. My first watercolor was about an inch thick. I asked Richard how long it would take to get a good one. He said “maybe 200 or 300”. I showed him my 300th painting and he said “well, maybe 500”. Richard and I have worked together off and on since I met him, and Annie has always been there too.
I also worked in the animation and design field the whole time. After that, I ended up in the film industry and worked freelance with Lucasfilm Ltd. and worked at Colossal Pictures. At Colossal, we did all the original MTV branding, Nike and Coca-Cola, Movie titles for Coppola. We did this shows Liquid Television and Back to the Future animated series.
But during that time, all of a sudden, the computer industry started. We started to do all of our art on computers. Going from one illustration every three days to 3 illustrations a day. This was a huge change in the design and illustration industry.
Microsoft ended up recruiting me into the interactive research television group under Nathan Myhrvold. Then they realized they didn’t really have the bandwidth to do interactive television. They said, “You can be the creative director of Kids Encarta or MSN.” And I said, “What’s MSN?” And they said, “It’s going to be our online portal.” And I said, “What’s an online portal?”
It was very early on in the Internet. I called my dad, and he asked about the Internet. I said, “The Internet is 18 colors, 4 typefaces, and everything snaps to a grid.” His response was, “What the F… does that have to do with design?” The team of designers and engineers ended up doing the first 3 to 4 iterations of MSN. Designing and building it with an international team.
Cindy and I wanted to come back to the Bay Area because we love the Bay Area. We started working with Red Sky Interactive, and we were doing all sorts of interactive things for Coca-Cola and Miller beer and people like that.
Then Cindy and I started our own company,
eat.tv, entertainment advertising technology, television.
We won three different Emmys for television scientific advancement (first streaming video). We worked with a lot of experiential Web sites and Apps for Fox Television, Vulcan, and Yahoo.
Here come the head-hunters again! From Yahoo, working with Marissa Mayer and the international design team. We created the weather app and the news digest app, each won an Apple design award. We also did about 15 to 17 other apps.
Then CNN came along and asked me to lead their international design team. This was a great chance for me to take all my technical knowledge and go back into broadcast and digital media. I also wanted to work in New York as my dad did. It was a terrific job. We were constantly releasing designs, maps, charts, and animation every day since the news was constantly coming at us. It’s everything I’ve learned in my career all in this one job, which is a pretty awesome way to end a career.
Of course, art never ends.
Dewey Reid
“My, Additional, Reid Timeline”,
by Ann Thompson
I met Dewey Reid in 1982, when he had his graphic arts studio, Reid Creative, above McNear’s Mystic Theatre in Petaluma, CA. His second location in Petaluma was a renovated school property that Dewey named: Design Lab. Dewey specialized his graphic talents into packaging: for Borden’s milk products, Seagram’s alcoholic drinks, and Concannon, Franciscan’s, and Sonoma-Cutrer vineyards.
Illustrations: Grateful Dead T‑shirts, August Wolf Records, Lovejoy Records, and Terrence Clancy Inc.
Animated and live-action commercials and special effects for feature films, for example: Lucas Film’s Industrial Light and Magic. Many of these films won awards. This last photo was taken at the George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch library.
Cindy Reid, too, is creative. She worked at John Korty Films. She played the part of ”Wistie” in The Ewok Adventure. She also worked on the animation. Cindy won an Emmy for this work.
Cindy also worked in animation at Colossal Pictures. She brought in Dewey, who brought in Richard Moore, into the animation world. Located in San Francisco’s Dogpatch District, Dewey became Creative Director of Pre-production and New Media. Dewey, Richard, and Cindy worked for MTV and many animation projects.
Colossal Pictures, founded in 1976, became well known in the 1980s for its innovative design work. They pioneered the “Blendo” look that featured a mixture of different animation techniques in the same commercial. Often live-action footage or photo montage was included along with stop-motion, cel animation, drawn images, and other techniques. They also developed the Liquid Television and Aeon Flux shows for MTV and are known for their music video productions for The Grateful Dead, Bobby McFerrin, Primus, The Kronos Quartet, Peter Gabriel, and other stars. Their feature work includes titles for such films as The Black Stallion, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They did special effects for The Right Stuff, Top Gun, Demolition Man, and Running Man. In addition, they provided animated sequences for Natural Born Killers and Tank Girl.
Thank you, Karl Cohen
Among these many feature films, there was also the animated television series, “Back to the Future”. For those who worked on the series, there was a flight to LA to Universal Studios for the introduction of the series. (Years later, that same crew gathered again to make a film telling stories of that time.)
There was the new software called “Painter”. I had already been experimenting with it at home. Dewey asked me if I could sketch figures in various costumes without stopping because this software would record my actions and these figures would then show in the video as they were being drawn. It was a perfect method and fun to experience! This three-page report by Dewey told of that “magic” that was happening.
Then there was Dewey’s and Cindy’s move to the Seattle area to work for Microsoft.
(Dewey said that it was known that at Microsoft, “only college-degreed may apply” — -but they hired him anyway.
Microsoft Network
For Microsoft’s Advanced Technologies Group, Dewey was the Creative Director of Interactive Television designing and developing an interactive television production facility called: “The Blender”.
Then Dewey became Microsoft Executive Creative Director.
This was the time, early 1990s, that the “net” or the “web” was a new term representing what could be achieved on a computer.
Along with others in his “Think Tank”, I offered many sheets of ideas sent from my home.
I show just one rough example of each of the many avenues of exploration.
First it was the: “Microsoft Network”. A logo was needed.
What about the terms used at that time: Net? Web?
Just starting somewhere: the visuals were of “casting out and bringing in the results”.
…then MSNBC!
As Microsoft Network was being developed, it caught the attention of NBC!
Soon, ”MS” from Microsoft’s online service and “NBC” from NBC National Broadcasting Company combined into one logo.
Microsoft reduced its stake in the cable channel to 18% in 2005 and fully sold its remaining shares to NBC in 2007.
(And now… the channel is now being rebranded from MSNBC to “MS NOW” in 2025, with no connection to the original Microsoft partnership remaining.)
At the time that MSNBC was an established platform, it was moved from Seattle, and Dewey and Cindy Reid were ready to come home to the SF Bay Area.
1999 – 2001—Red Sky Interactive with clients: Coca-Cola, Nike, Sony Pictures, Samsung, and Miller Brewing.
2001 – 2011 —eat.tv.inc Founder and Chief Creative Officer. Clients: the Buck Institute, Warner Bros., Fox Television, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Vulcan, and Yahoo.
2011 – 2014 — Dewey became Yahoo VP of Global Design Teams, followed as VP of Design for Mobile and Emerging Products.
2014 – 2019 — Dewey was VP Executive Creative Designer at CNN, where he developed an international design culture for a multi-experience team in: Atlanta, London, Dubai, Hong Kong, California, Canada, and Costa Rica.
The Reids were living in Atlanta and NYC (still with their home in Marin County,CA,)
To tell more of each avenue of creativeness, that Dewey Reid traveled, it is best that hedescribes it himself, in this video:
https://gt20.org/videos/dewey-reid-digital-design-director-cnn/
I still see Dewey and Cindy Reid as:
Ann Thompson