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Moving from Drawing Board Graphics to World-Wide Computerized Communications

Posted on October 9, 2025October 9, 2025 By Hey You

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.

Dewey Awards
Dewey Awards 
Emmy Award
Emmy Award 

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.

Dewey & Cindy
Dewey & Cindy 
Product design
Product design 
Skywalker Ranch
Skywalker Ranch 
Dewey with Sonhy
Dewey with Sonhy 

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.

Wistle
Wistle 
Cindy as Wistrie
Cindy as Wistrie 

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.)

Collossal MTV
Collossal MTV 
Back to the Future
Back to the Future 
Reunion
Reunion 

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.

Painting with Light
Painting with Light 
Painting with Light
Painting with Light 
Painting with Light
Painting with Light 
Raster Oops Painter
Raster Oops Painter 

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”.

MSN Logo Idea
MSN Logo Idea 
Casting Catch
Casting Catch 
Reaching Everywhere
Reaching Everywhere 
At Your Fingertip scales
At Your Fingertip scales 
OnStage
OnStage 
Home to sign in
Home to sign in 
Home to sign in
Home to sign in 
MSN Buttons
MSN Buttons 
MSNBC
MSNBC 
MSNBC
MSNBC 

…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.

Dewey Join s CNN
Dewey Join s CNN 
Dewey at CNN
Dewey at CNN 

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/​v​i​d​e​o​s​/​d​e​w​e​y​-​r​e​i​d​-​d​i​g​i​t​a​l​-​d​e​s​i​g​n​-​d​i​r​e​c​t​o​r​-​c​nn/

I still see Dewey and Cindy Reid as:

Dewey Making Magic
Dewey Making Magic 
Cindy
Cindy 

Ann Thompson

Of That Time, Recollections

Posts pagination

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