As a longtime designer and creative director for Viacom, Rodger Belknap touched seemingly every corner of the media giant’s portfolio of music channels.

Starting as a designer for VH1 in the mid-‘90s and finishing out as SVP and creative director of MTV2 and mtvU in 2014, he was there for MTV’s first-ever end-to-end branding campaign, “Look Closer,” witnessed the creation of MTV2’s iconic two-headed dog logo by Stacy Drummond, and created stage and screen content for such live experiences as the Video Music Awards, and mtvU’s Woodie Awards at SXSW. And while serving as VP creative director for Logo TV, he oversaw three rebrands in four years as the tide of gay culture began to crash into mainstream entertainment.

Every day was something new at Viacom, but one thing remained constant:

“Motion and music,” Belknap told Brief, “is what I love the most. Dancing is so important, the one tribal thing in all of us. When we’re out dancing we’re not worried about anything. We’re just enjoying the moment.”

Belknap left Viacom in 2014. A few months ago, he opened his own studio, Belknap and Company, which he carefully built to preserve that spirit of music and movement, to create a space where his designer friends can enjoy the moment as much as possible. While at Viacom, Belknap had always ensured there was “a disco ball in the pit of designers,” he said, as well as a turntable. “We would have trance hour every day at noon, and then 3:00 p.m. was open deck, so anyone could play anything they wanted to.” He likes to bring people together, to see them click creatively and have fun.

“I’m a nurturing creative director,” Belknap said. “My favorite thing [at Viacom] was recruiting interns and seeing them blossom, and getting them all in a room and getting them to mix and match. For me that was the most fun part, bringing everyone together. That’s the springboard of the basis for Belknap and Company – to continue that.”

Rodger Belknap was in high school when MTV launched in 1981, providing him with a blissful four years of “watching claymation with Peter Gabriel and seeing A-Ha doing cel animation on top of video.” The channel stirred something in him, its unhinged barrage of media showing the fledgling creative in him that “you can be a designer and apply it to all these different things.”

A native Texan, Belknap went to the Parsons School of Design in New York, where he studied under Emily Oberman, a future partner at Pentagram and co-founder of Number Seventeen who was then a senior designer at the legendary studio M&Co. Oberman helped Belknap get freelance work at M&Co, where he got to know her future Number Seventeen partner Bonnie Siegler, who was then working for VH1. Siegler proceeded to bring Belknap into the VH1 fold, where his Viacom journey began. Shortly thereafter, he was moved “upstairs” to join the MTV team.

“It was so exciting when I hit MTV,” Belknap said, and not just because it was the mid-to-late ‘90s and the network was airing groundbreaking motion graphics such as Me Company’s amazing 3D work on Bjork’s music videos, and the innovative techno collaborations of Underworld and the design collective Tomato. It was also a time when MTV’s internal off-air group was merging with its on-air group, and “all of a sudden, all these animators that used to create these things for MTV – it was given to us,” Belknap continued. “We started handling the promos, and then from there the show packaging, and usually those things were all done in silos, so it was this great time when there was a convergence of a creative direction for the channel. It wasn’t just like the guys from Real World sending in their show; they checked in with us and said, ‘what do you think we should do for our show open?’”

Its creative teams unified, MTV decided to unify its message as well. Prior to Belknap’s arrival, the channel was generally all about throwing “anything up that’s really artsy and cool,” maintaining a “landscape of mishmash art inter-cut with music videos and later, reality television.” But shortly after he came aboard, MTV decided to pursue what would become “kind of the first branding for MTV that was very intentional… It was the first time that we as a group of designers looked at the problem and said, ‘let’s do something really cool. We’re MTV. We can do anything we want.’”

Dubbed “Look Closer,” MTV’s first cohesive brand campaign was a dramatic departure from what had come before. Belknap’s team “stripped the channel of everything that it was known for,” he said, “the slash-and-dazzle edits, the really fast-paced cutting, and we slowed everything down and we repackaged every show using a high-speed camera, so everything was these 30-second, super slow-motion moments of time.”

The compulsion toward constant reinvention at MTV likely prepared Belknap for the next major milestone along his career path, Logo TV. As VP creative director of Viacom’s LGBT-targeted network, Belknap oversaw a bastion of gay entertainment during a tipping point in gay culture.

“The history of Logo mirrors what’s happened in our society,” he said. “When I got there it was considered a ‘cause’ – a ‘channel for the gays’... And then all of a sudden we’ve got Glee, and then we’ve got gay rights propelling faster into the future faster than we ever thought… And every year we had to pivot our brand. During the [four] years I was there, we did three rebrands because society was changing so much. It kept us on our toes.”

By 2012, Belknap had moved from Logo back to the MTV realm, this time launching a rebrand for MTV2 “completely inspired by customizable sneaker culture” such as the interchangeable color combinations being offered by Nike and Adidas. The network’s color palette brightened while also becoming impermanent, never the same from month to month. A tab was placed behind the iconic two-headed dog logo to make it more legible, and then turned into a navigation device that wrapped around the entire channel. Belknap’s team also streamlined all the promos for efficiency so instead of having three shoots – a promo shoot and then a still shoot for off-air and then another shoot for billboards – “we said, ‘we’re going to gather all of our talent and put them in a white room and we’re going to shoot everything in one day and then we’re going to assign each show its own color,’” he said, “‘and that color is going to evolve each season.’

The end result was a “very tight, bright, welcoming environment” that propelled MTV2 to its highest viewer totals ever in 2013, and some of its highest-rated show premieres since the channel debuted in 1996.

Somewhere during his Viacom run, Belknap found time to help launch MTV World and MTV Russia. While working on MTVu, he headed up the college-oriented channel’s Woodie Awards, which honor and help break new artists in music, building them from a relatively small event at New York’s Roseland Ballroom to the “party of the year” at SXSW.

“I love spectacle,” he said. “I love doing content for screens. Anything that resembles a big party or a disco is just fun.”

After nearly two cumulative decades designing for television’s biggest music-oriented networks, and for their massive live experiences, “it was time for me to take the next step outside of traditional broadcast,” Belknap said. There are industries his television career has brought him in touch with and now he’d like to explore more deeply, such as fashion, where companies like Conde Nast are “really looking to be relevant in today’s social media world,” he said, “[to] create video content that will align with their brands while not suffering the loss of selling magazines.”

Belknap also hopes to “explore publishers who create literature and poems,” he said. “I think they’re a little bit behind in being current in how they can advertise. There are amazing things that people should know about, but intellectual literature is really kind of a small world and I think it should be put on a bigger stage. “If you treat them like we treat [pop artists] and we gave them music videos for their books, maybe people would start reading them.”

To the readers who still cherish such scholarly discourse, it should come as a godsend to hear a designer of Belknap’s stature and influence talking openly and without irony about helping put publishers of it back into the limelight. His comments in that regard are also maybe the strongest evidence of the nurturer in him, the surest sign that even while working on some of the world’s biggest media brands, he really was driven by the pure and simple joy of human connection.

With Belknap and Company, “I wanted to fulfill a longtime dream of creating a studio outside the corporate system,” he said. One with “principles based on a better, more balanced work life,” that would “act as a refuge amidst the chaos of the city” and that would tap into “what I loved about my career at Viacom, which was nurturing and assembling the best and smartest creatives.”

And the disco ball, he said, is “up and running and working fabulously.”

Rodger Belknap portrait by Timothy Saccenti

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