Sesame Street Style Guides
Brand style guides and toolkits for Sesame Street, to help stay on-model.
A style guide is design for people who aren't you. It has to let a licensee across the country, or a team you'll never meet, reproduce a brand perfectly, across packaging, retail, e-commerce, and social, without losing a thread of what makes it itself. I built and maintained several of these systems for Sesame Street, including the global toolkit for Learn & Play, drawn from scratch: logo, color, patterns, and the art for every play space.
Skills & Expertise
Design Systems
-
Brand style guides & toolkits
-
Usage guidelines & sample applications
-
Brand localization & market adaptation
-
On-model consistency & brand guardianship
-
Systems built for licensees to use without you in the room
Graphic Design
-
Logo & identity development
-
Color & typography systems
-
Brand-book layout & production
-
Print- and digital-ready files
Digital Illustration
-
Character & environment illustration
-
Icon & pattern design
-
New assets matched seamlessly to an existing style or brand metric
-
Vector & raster (Illustrator, Photoshop)
MY ROLE: Brand Update
Can you tell me how to get...to Berlin?
Like most American kids, I grew up on Sesame Street. What I didn't realize until much later is that it airs all over the world, and each country has its own cast of characters alongside the familiar ones. I learned that firsthand working on the 50th anniversary brand book for the German version, Sesamstraße.
​
The brief sounded simple: take the existing 50th anniversary brand book and rework it around the new characters. That meant creating all-new images, graphics, icons, and patterns for the German cast and weaving them so seamlessly into the original that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Matching an established brand book that precisely, on an IP this beloved, is the real test, and it's the type of on-model consistency licensed brands rely on.
​
In addition to the logos and patterns, I mocked up a range of sample merchandise to round out the guide, showing licensees how the new characters could live on real products, and the German market waiting to buy them.
Sesame Street
Sesamstraße 50th Anniversary Brand Book
MY ROLE: Logo Development
Fitting in the neighborhood
Few logos carry as much heritage as Sesame Street, so a Learn & Play mark had to feel like family the instant you saw it, while still standing on its own as the name of a place kids beg to visit.
I developed a mark that sits comfortably inside decades of Sesame heritage, playful, friendly, and unmistakably theirs, while giving the attraction a clear identity of its own. It also had to work everywhere a family might spot it, from the sign above the door to a tiny icon on a map, so I built it to stay crisp and cheerful at any size.
MY ROLE: Logo & Concept Development
Designing the spaces where the learning happens
Learn & Play is built from individual play spaces, each its own little world inside the Sesame universe. I created the interior imagery for those spaces, turning plain rooms into colorful, character-filled environments where kids can climb, explore, and learn.
Every space had to feel like a natural extension of the show, so I pulled the warmth and personality of Sesame Street into the details and into the way each area invites a child in.
Sesame Street
Learn & Play Global Guide
MY ROLE: Style Guide Development
One toolkit, built to travel
Bringing it all together, I developed the store's global toolkit, the master system that keeps the brand consistent everywhere it appears. I established the color palette, used existing Sesame Street artwork to generate the graphics, and documented how every piece fits together, from logo to play space to signage, to marketing and social media posts. That's the difference between being one great location and being a concept a new team can pick up and open looking exactly right, without losing a smidgen of what makes it Sesame Street.
CONTACT ME:
Tel. 818.527.5551
Los Angeles Metro
@2026 Graye Smith, all rights reserved