Los Angeles, 1994 to 2004.

DreamWorks Animation began as one part of a larger company. Wikipedia says that on 12 October 1994 the film director and producer Steven Spielberg, the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and the music executive David Geffen founded DreamWorks SKG, the three letters taken from their surnames. TIME, in a feature on studio logos published on 24 September 2012, gives the same founding year and the same three founders.

Animation was part of the plan from the start. Wikipedia says Spielberg brought over artists from Amblimation, his London-based animation studio, some in 1995 and the rest after that studio closed in 1997, while Katzenberg recruited animation staff from Disney. In 1995 DreamWorks SKG set up a computer-animation venture with Pacific Data Images (PDI) in Northern California, which produced Antz (1998). The same year saw The Prince of Egypt (1998), which combined computer imagery with drawn animation.

Wikipedia says DreamWorks then created DreamWorks Animation as a business division making both kinds of feature, and reorganised its PDI holding as PDI/DreamWorks, the division’s Northern California branch. The division also partnered with the Bristol stop-motion studio Aardman, beginning with Chicken Run (2000). Wikipedia says the studio decided in 2001 to leave hand-drawn features after Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003); from Shrek 2 (2004) its own productions were computer-animated, apart from Aardman co-productions.

The division became its own company in 2004. Wikipedia says it was spun off as a publicly traded company, DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc., on 27 October 2004, with Katzenberg at its head and Spielberg and Geffen staying on as investors and consultants. The SKG initials stayed in the corporate name, and so did the DreamWorks name and logo: Wikipedia says that in January 2009 Spielberg and DreamWorks Animation signed a licence letting the live-action DreamWorks Pictures use the DreamWorks trademarks, logo and name.

From a painting to a moon child.

The studio’s moon logo began as a painting. TIME reported on 24 September 2012 that Spielberg had always wanted an image of a man fishing from the moon and planned to make it with computer graphics. The visual-effects supervisor Dennis Muren suggested he also consider a painting and commissioned the illustrator Robert Hunt to carry out the idea. One of Hunt’s alternative versions showed a young boy fishing, with Hunt’s son as the model. TIME said Spielberg was taken with that version, a moving version was made at Industrial Light & Magic, and John Williams wrote the accompanying music. Wikipedia names Wes Takahashi of ILM as the animator.

DreamWorks Animation inherited that logo from its former parent. Wikipedia says the standard DreamWorks opening ran on its features from Antz to Sinbad. In 2004 the studio introduced its own version, in which the boy floats up to the moon on balloons in daylight, to music adapted by Harry Gregson-Williams from his “Fairytale” cue for Shrek (2001). It opened films from Shrek 2 to Monsters vs. Aliens (2009). A 2010 version placed the boy fishing on the moon in outer space and ran from How to Train Your Dragon (2010) to Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017).

Ownership changed the opening again. Wikipedia says that after the 2016 acquisition by NBCUniversal the studio introduced a logo that begins in drawn animation before turning into computer imagery, with a fanfare by John Powell; the full version arrived with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World on 22 February 2019.

The latest version reworked the figure itself. The Hollywood Reporter reported on 25 November 2022 that a new curtain raiser would open screenings of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The project was led by the production designer Kendal Cronkhite with the producer Suzanne Buirgy. In it, the silhouette long known as the “moon boy” was redubbed the “moon child”, and the team told the paper they had removed gender-specific details from the original model so that the figure could stand for all of the studio’s young viewers. The sequence moves through characters from The Bad Guys, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, The Boss Baby and Trolls before ending with Shrek, and Cronkhite said the characters had been given a simplification pass so they would sit more like graphic figures in that world. Studio president Margie Cohn told the paper that at the studio they like to say all dreamers are welcome.

A name, a silhouette and a fanfare.

For an animation or motion-design studio, the identity rarely stops at a static logo. The mark usually has to move, and the opening ident that plays before a film, a commercial reel or a festival screening is often the first place an audience meets the name. A few seconds of motion has to carry the studio’s character: the pace of the cut, the way a letterform assembles or dissolves, the sound that lands with the final frame.

Characters can also become part of the brand. A recurring figure, a mascot or a shape that first appeared in a piece of work may migrate into the logo, the website header or the end card, so that the studio is recognised by something it made rather than by its wordmark alone.

The reel and the website are the other main brand surfaces. A showreel is edited like a manifesto, and a studio site is usually built around full-bleed moving image, with typography and colour kept quiet so the work sits in front. When reading these identities, look at how the logo behaves in motion, how the studio frames its own reel, and how consistently that system carries across offices, credits and social channels.

Owners, campuses and dated facts.

The public company lasted twelve years. Deadline reported on 22 August 2016 that Comcast had closed its acquisition of DreamWorks Animation, ending the studio’s life as a publicly traded company. DreamWorks Animation became part of NBCUniversal’s Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, alongside Universal Pictures, and Deadline said Katzenberg would remain chairman of DreamWorks New Media and consult for NBCUniversal. Wikipedia says the deal had been announced on 28 April 2016 and approved by the United States Department of Justice on 21 June 2016. NBCUniversal has owned the studio since 2016.

Wikipedia says that Chris Meledandri, head of the Universal-owned Illumination, had been expected to oversee both studios, but the two stayed separate and he became a consultant to DreamWorks. It says Margie Cohn, who had led television animation for the group, was given oversight of all film and television operations in January 2019. Universal Pictures distributes the studio’s films, beginning with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

The studio’s working base is in Glendale, California. Cartoon Brew reported on 22 January 2015 that DreamWorks Animation would shut down PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City, California, offering some of its artists the chance to move to the company’s southern campus in Glendale, and that the studio would begin outsourcing some productions, including Captain Underpants. Wikipedia says the studio has used its own animation software, Premo, since 2014 and its own renderer, MoonRay, since 2018, releasing MoonRay as open-source software on 15 March 2023. It also says the studio does not keep a single house style, a point executives made in interviews in 2012 and 2022.

For a design guide, DreamWorks Animation shows how a painted image can carry a studio through new owners, new technology and new films, redrawn rather than replaced. Compare Pixar and Illumination, two other animation studios in this collection. For this guide we use moonlight gold, night blue and deep sky with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep DreamWorks Animation’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.