Doug Grimmett “wasn’t in television at all” when he started Primal Screen in 1995, a full-service design studio based in Atlanta whose clients have since included PBS, Cartoon Network, AMC and many more. He was chief creative officer and a partner at FGI, an integrated marketing agency in Chapel Hill, where he had moved his family from New York for a more permanent work situation and a less hassled lifestyle.

While in New York, Grimmett had worked for the likes of CBS, the legendary design firm M & Co, and Workman Publishing. He found himself “drawn to things that were just fun and playful, like toys and books and calendars.” He created an entire line of “robot stuff,” which included a couple years’ worth of wall calendars. As the current moment is a golden age for television, the ‘80s, said Grimmett, were a “golden age for wall calendars.”

They were a big enough deal that a company like Peter Wallach Productions, renowned for its stop-motion animation work on commercials and music videos such as Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” might call up a guy like Grimmett and hire him based solely on his robot-themed contributions to the format. When Grimmett started styling stop-motion scenes for Wallach, he “discovered the thrill of creating worlds like that,” he told Brief. “Once you see your work move, it’s hard to go back.”

After relocating to North Carolina, Grimmett’s rise through the ranks of FGI dovetailed with a “boom time for animation” during the mid-‘90s. “You had the Viacom networks like MTV and Nickelodeon both coming on air and there was this huge demand for music videos, and animation was the favorite [approach],” he said. “It was just more entertaining than watching someone in concert, more cerebral and thematic.” At the same time, the barriers to creating that desired content were rapidly collapsing with the advent of desktop video tools, and Grimmett, despite having no connections to broadcast TV at the time, saw a potential business model there that “was flexible and expandable.”

The core of his idea was a broadcast design firm that would invert the agency model, “where everything was about the bottom line,” he said. “What if you had a company that wasn’t just about making money but was about making lives, that was a vehicle for opportunities… What if you had a practice model instead of a growth model?”

Money, maintains Grimmett, is not the thing that motivates creative people, “but the acknowledgement of the value of the work.” It was the beginning of the dot-com boom and everyone was “trying to think about online ideas, about really quickly building this massive thing based around having a huge audience really fast. It wasn’t about motivating creative but the start-up mentality of, ‘everyone’s going to be miserable for five years then we’ll all be rich.’” Grimmett wanted the design to come before the dollars. He wanted to “create a vehicle that would allow us to work on the cutting edge of content development, with new platforms and emerging technologies,” but that would be as much a design firm as much as it was a production or animation company. The resulting work, he believed, would not just entertain, but would “create an affect, a change of behavior,” which was especially important to a designer like Grimmett, whose playful nature lent itself naturally to content for children, for whom it was more important than anyone else to “teach them something, to give them something useful.”

Grimmett left FGI in 1995 to launch Primal Screen with his FGI colleague Stephen Mank, a composer and sound designer. They worked out of Grimmett’s house in Chapel Hill until a brand identity job came through from Cartoon Network demanding more than 300 spots, and prompting a move of the operation to a real office in Atlanta, as well as a significant expansion in staff. They never looked back, and have since produced an astonishing array of work on identities, refreshes, promos, show opens and interactive campaigns for the likes of Boomerang, Sprout, The Weather Channel, Nickelodeon, TNT, Disney Channel, HGTV, Oxygen, AMC and many other broadcast clients. For PBS Kids alone, Primal Screen has helped re-launch the brand on three separate occasions since 1999, creating an entire storytelling universe for its recurring characters of Dot and Dash through network-defining interstitials. In the latest refresh, they added new characters to the brand, the younger twins Dale and Dee, another chapter in a broadcast vendor/client relationship nearly unparalleled for its longevity. “Every iteration we’ve been right there with them,” said Grimmett, “developing these characters and stories but also developing the whole personality of the network through this work. It’s very unusual to keep working with a group like that.”

Grimmett said Primal Screen’s success in the kids’ space comes from a well-honed understanding of the arc of childhood development. “The difference between a three-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year old is astounding,” he said. “They grow so fast all the way through elementary school and what appeals to them is rather narrow.” Given that mindset, he sees the advent of technology and interactive platforms as a powerful tool to engage kids at different ages with greater precision and efficacy. With tablets, for instance, “kids can touch them and they can participate and you can have a conversation with them. You can show them things, give them encouragement and feedback.” PBS, a network that does rigorous testing of its content, “has found that the efficacy of the online curriculum is way better than it is on broadcast,” he continued. “You can accomplish something online.”

In a testament to its knack for engaging children, Primal Screen recently wrapped up a year-long project not with a broadcast client, but with Scholastic, which found them working on a math curriculum series for middle-schoolers, employing whimsical animations and motion infographics to explain concepts in algebra and geometry. “Because of our work for PBS,” said Grimmett, “we can take a job like that. If you go to a [more traditional animation studio], they’re note necessarily going to be thinking about engagement with kids. They’re just going to make really cool animation.”

Though he may be at the tail end of his career, Grimmett’s enthusiasm for new methods of learning and engagement allude to a young heart. He’s a seasoned craftsman and entrepreneur whose company has garnered hundreds of advertising, design and broadcast awards. He’s on the board of Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) and the dean’s advisory board of his alma mater Florida State University’s College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance. But he still gets as excited as a fresh-faced newcomer when he gets to work with his field’s iconic personalities and brands. Which happened twice over recently when Primal Screen teamed with Milton Glaser to turn the legendary designer’s iconic Bob Dylan poster into a psychedelic Mad Men promo. Then they returned to Mad Men for its final season, creating a promo-homage to Pable Ferro’s titles for the original The Thomas Crown Affair (which was subsequently picked up by Ellen DeGeneres for a hilarious spoof on her show).

Whether creating animation segments for an education company, re-facing a kids’ network or designing elegant promos for one of television’s most critically acclaimed dramas, Grimmett has stayed true to his vision of a company that puts the work first. “Part of our ethos involves the time we spend our waking hours,” he said. “What do you spend your time doing and who are you doing it with? What kind of a place do you go to? Not just in terms of the culture of the place but the environment? Does it foster the creativity? Everything goes back to that. Everyone here comes from a creative background. That’s the filter all our judgments are based on.”

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