Nancy Stevenson, Creative Director of Character Design & Mark Magner, Design Director for Sesame Workshop join hosts Scott Sheppard and Gene Gable to discuss some details on their work creating and maintaining the artwork and photography behind the licensing of the worlds most recognized children’s educational brand, Sesame Street. Nancy and Mark work with a talented team creating digital art for products, toys, publishing, animation, online games, web, mobile devices, etc. for Sesame Workshop characters.

Sesame Workshop is a non-profit organization founded to create a fun and educational content for media that helps children in over 140 countries during their earliest and most critical developmental stages. The Workshop develops programs that help children, parents, and teachers. Much of the proceeds gained from licensing and product sales goes toward creating new programs and outreach initiatives around the world.

Nancy and Mark explain that one of their greatest challenges is to take the 3D characters we know and love as “Sesame Street Muppets”, and convert them into 2D characters, icons, and images. They oversee, manage, create, and convert hundreds of characters, which are also unique and localized to fit within local cultures and markets. They develop the style, brand look, and color guidelines which are provided to their license and educational partners across the globe to ensure the characters have a consistent look in any use. Sesame Workshop recently updated their global standards to Adobe products, including PDF, EPS, and TIFF formats. Mark describes the work flow they use to communicate input to artwork submitted for approval.

Nancy & Mark also share some tips on how they stay up to date on the latest design tools and how they keep up their creativity to best target the children’s educational market. Sesame Workshop is working on many exciting new programs including a brand new website launching this August, and 3D CGI MAYA animation for a project in Nigeria.

For more information about their brand, work, projects, and mission of Sesame Workshop visit their website at: http://www.sesameworkshop.org

Design News of the Week with Jay Nelson

This week Jay shares some tips about using Adobe’s new tools and services for collaborating online at Acrobat.com. Jay provides some highlights of the new features and Gene compares the site as a “Webex” built for designers. Jay also announces the kick-off of the QuarkXpress 8 road show which is traveling across the globe in 50 cities featuring a half-day session about their latest features. Jay also shares news from MasterColors, who create Master Colors HVC Color Composer®, about their free online tutorials that can help you learn about using color more creatively in your designs.

For more information about Jay and Design Tools visit: http://www.design-tools.com.

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