It’s not one logo, but 3. The Meatball, the Peacock, and the Eye.

The Big 3. ABC. NBC. CBS.

Here in the US, despite all of their upstart competition, the three most experienced names in television have maintained the strongest brand identities. Their successful identities are represented by their venerable brand marks, or to use the more common term, their logos.
 
The Meatball. ABC’s logo was designed by Paul Rand in 1962. Steven Heller recounts Rand’s work on the ABC logo in his monograph Paul Rand.¹ Rand was not the first to attempt a new design for ABC; they had asked others before him. As with so much of Rand’s work, his solution was simple, elemental, geometric. Rand recognized that in set in a lower case typeface like Futura, abc’s letters all shared a circular geometry. He redrew those letter to accentuate that relationship and placed them in a larger circle. Heller states that Rand’s solution was accepted immediately. The term meatball was what ABC’s marketing and promotion personnel came to call their beloved mark.

The Peacock. NBC gave the country the bird at least three times before adopting their streamlined peacock in 1985. In 1956 a multi-hued, eleven-feathered bird was used to signify programming that was “in living color.” In 1979 the company superimposed a new eleven-feathered peacock over an outline version of their 4 year-old graphic N logo. NBC worked with the renowned Chermayeff & Geismar studio to develop what would become the peacock still in use today. 27 years later.

The Eye. Early in the second half of the 20th century, William Golden co-opted a Shaker folk symbol as the mark for the fledgling CBS Television network. Golden’s adaptation of the eye was first seen over the CBS airwaves on November 16, 1951. Golden told his contemporary George Lois that the eye represented CBS “looking at the world.”² His relationship with CBS President Frank Stanton granted Golden the respect, responsibility and authority to direct all aspects of the visual identity of the CBS corporation.

The real key to the success of these 3 iconic trademarks is the commitment of their corporations to continue using the marks. The oldest of these, the CBS eye has been in continuous use for 61 years. It may sound like circular reasoning to say that these three are successful because they have been used for a long time. But all 3 logos have been allowed to mature and adapt to different technologies and treatments while remaining, for the most part, intact. The stewards of these identities should be praised for their commitment to maintaining an identity that pre-dates their reign. As Paul Rand said, “Even a bad logo shouldn’t be changed without good reason.”¹

A few side notes on the histories of these logos. The ABC logo almost met its end in the late 1980s after ABC and its properties were purchased by Capital Cities Group. Steven Heller reports that the new owners “demanded that the Rand logo be altered or scrapped.”¹ Rand was not invited to participate, although given his philosophy on changing logos, it’s unlikely he would have been interested in solving the same problem a second time. The meatball survived that challenge and even outlived the Capital Cities ownership. It seems the new owners at the Walt Disney Company knew better than to change something that had been so successful.

I worked at CBS in the early 90s as an employee of both CBS and Pittard Sullivan, an entertainment design company. I oversaw the day-to-day promotion graphic design for the network. Surprisingly, it was quite impossible to find a master file of William Golden’s CBS eye. I was shocked to realize the number of poorly realized versions that had been appearing on air. I actually ended up relying on my former RIT professor Roger Remington’s book Nine Pioneers of American Graphic Design for an accurate drawing of Golden’s eye. I copied that version and adopted it as the master logo for our use during my tenure.

This kind of logo creep wasn’t unique to CBS. Odd variations of Paul Rand’s ABC meatball were in wide use up until the mid 00s. ABC hired a designer to redraw the ABC logo and create master versions of logos for various ABC properties including ABC Sports, ABC News and ABC Family. That designer was not me.

Chermayeff & Geismar’s partner Sagi Haviv mistakenly re-wrote history in his recent book Identify. That book lists the current peacock’s debut as 1980.³ Their peacock arrived in 1985 according to the C&G website and my questionably reliable memory.

*I realize that it’s equivalent to argue the relative benefits of apples versus oranges to compare a title design of a television program to a brand mark for a network. This is a very broad view of graphic identity of television properties. In some future post I may attempt to point to the best in TV program logo (or title design). I welcome suggestions.

¹ Steven Heller, Paul Rand (Phaidon, 2000), 190.
² R. Roger Remington and Barbara Hodik, Nine Pioneers of American Graphic Design (MIT Press, 1989), 72.
³ Sagi Haviv, Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design… (Print, 2011), 20.

Last week I upgraded my Adobe Production Premium Creative Suite to the latest version– CS6. Today I opened the Contents folder of the new After Effects CS6 application (version 11.0.0.378). Within the Required folder was an After Effects Project file labeled secret.aep. Taking their bait, I opened the project and rendered the movie seen here. The video is an animated list of 44 member’s of Adobe’s After Effects team that highlights AE’s new vector extrusion capability. Nice work team.

The smartest show on the art and business of moviemaking has slightly higher production value than Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns. It’s a chat show that presents a half hour of intelligent conversation with guests like Don Cheadle, Gore Verbinski, Ewan McGregor, Jay Roach, Michael Mann, and Charlize Theron.

The full name of the show is Movie Talk with Peter Bart. It airs locally in Los Angeles on KNBC-4 at 1:30 AM on Sunday mornings. It follows a vapid travel show called LX.TV:1st Look. I suppose Mr Bart and his producers realize that they aren’t getting audience spillover from that previous show or from anyone who fell asleep watching Saturday Night Live. This is a show is certainly meant to be recorded and viewed at some later date.

Peter Bart’s bio refers to him as a journalist and film producer. Until 2009 Bart had spent 20 years as head editor of the Hollywood trade journal Variety. Bart began as a reporter before getting into the movie business in the late 1960s with Robert “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans. As Paramount’s vice-president of production, Bart had a hand in creating some of Paramounts best films of that era including Rosemary’s Baby, True Grit, Harold and Maude and The Godfather.

Bart has his detractors, but he knows his subject as well as anyone. He’s been immersed in Hollywood and the business of entertainment for more than 40 years. He knows his subject well and he respects those that make work that he likes. The conversations are thoughtful and congenial without trying to be too familiar.

Movie Talk with Peter Bart will begin airing Sunday, May 20 on the Encore network in the US. It will also air on the Sundance Channel in Canada and throughout Europe.

Kerning is perhaps the second most misused term in typography after font. Kerning is the adjustment of space between two character glyphs, or kerning pairs. Any workable text font has kerning pairs built into its code. Letters are designed to acknowledge the previous character and be spaced accordingly. That’s why a lowercase a that follows a cap T nests comfortably under that T’s horizontal stroke; a lowercase h respects the space needed by the capital T and stands politely alongside. Likewise a lowercase v or y follows a cap A more closely than other, more upright characters.

The term kerning is derived from the noun kern. A kern is the part of a typographic character that projects from the body or vertical stroke of a given stroke. In the cap T there are two kerns– the right and left terminals of the horizontal stroke. In the time of metal handset type, the space beneath the kern would be cut away to allow better letterfit with the physical character that followed. That act was referred to as kerning.

The goal of kerning is to give typeset letters the appearance of proportionally equal spacing, enhancing the visual balance and the ability to be read the text. When a pair of characters appear too close to one another they call attention to themselves, creating an apparent darker density in the overall gray appearance, or consistency, of a page, paragraph, sentence or word. Characters can also be too far apart, making noticeable white spaces where there should’t be. White space in text is meant to follow a word or punctuation. Disproportionate white space between characters is confusing and evidence of some combination of a bad font, poorly coded word-processing application and ill-equipped user.

In most Roman text typography, letters are not meant to touch. The space between them is what defines the shape of a word. Crowding characters to the point that they touch might work in some advertising or logo design. But for type meant to be read as text, colliding letterforms are disruptive and a sign of bad design (unless it’s the 1990s and you’re David Carson). There are instances where in order for spacing to appear balanced, letters must overlap as in letter sequences like f-i or f-f-l. Quality typography solves this problem by replacing those sequences with ligatures– those conjoined letters that exist as a single character, as with fi, ffl and others like the ty in the sentence below.

Letterspacing is the preset distance between characters built into a given font. Headlines typically have less space between letters than do the letters in a paragraph of text. Advertising headlines are most often set tighter than editorial headlines. A versatile typeface family will include both headline and text versions of the typeface, recognizing the different spacing requirements of these specific uses. For most of its infancy, digital typography has relied on a one font serves all uses approach. Certain page layout programs like Quark and Adobe InDesign could compensate for that shortcoming. But often designers have been left to their own devices, manipulating the relative space between letters to achieve better spacing depending upon the use. Often they are left to rely on tracking control to adjust spacing deemed either too tight or too loose.

Tracking and kerning are not the same thing. It is true that both terms refer to the manipulation of space between letters, but kerning refers to spacing between individual pairs of letters. Tracking refers to the manipulation of overall letterspacing, the relative space of all letters in a given line or block of text. The amount of tracking should be inversely proportionally to the size of the text. Smalled text requires more tracking; larger type needs less tracking.

I asked Thomas Phinney of Extensis if he knew of the origin of the term tracking (Tom’s a fellow alumnus of RIT). He discovered that it can be attributed to early phototypesetting; still, tracking is a relatively new term in centuries old craft of typography. Tom pointed me to a quote from this excellent article by Jim Felici found on Graphics.com:*

“The term tracking has its roots in one of the original phototypesetting machines, the Photon, which created images of characters by flashing a strobe light through a font that consisted of a rotating film-negative disk. The image was focused through a lens and directed onto photographic film by a prism. The prism was mounted on a toothed track, and it advanced according to the width of the character being imaged. The amount of space allotted to each character, then, was a function of how the prism tracked. These days the track is gone, but the term tracking remains.”

The space defined between letters is as important to the character of a typeface as are the letterform shapes themselves. An expert type designer determined what spacing gave the best balance to the characters when used as text; that designer built that optimum space into each of the typeface’s individual fonts. The space was predetermined to optimize the typeface. Unless you are an expert typographer, please think twice before adjusting the tracking.

Word Spacing like letterspacing is built into fonts. And as with letterspacing, text requires more word space than do headlines. I find that I am often designing type that is somewhere between text and headlines. When I create titles for video, I am usually typesetting small blocks of copy or single sentences. I find that most of my own word spacing falls closer to headline spacing than text. Moderately tighter word spacing works well for shorter bits of typography, like the text in presentation slides or children’s books.

Word spacing becomes variable when creating a column of justified text, that is text that lines up on both left and right sides of the column. In these cases the amount of potential variation is built into the font. In better typefaces (with an ample column width) the variation should be hardly noticeable. Often the narrow margins of newspaper columns lead to noticeably wide or tight spacing — even widely spaced letters. That kind of letterspacing, may be understood as necessary in newspapers, but it is unacceptable in other professional typography.

Line Spacing and Leading describe the distance between individual lines of text. Line spacing is measured from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the next line. Adobe sets its default line spacing at 120%. In Adobe Photoshop, a column of text set in 18 point of any typeface, will have its line spacing set at 21.6 points. The leading is the difference of the line spacing minus the type size. In the example just mentioned the leading is 3.6 points. If there is no leading, the text is said to be “set solid.” The term leading comes from handset typography– lines of text were separated by thin strips of lead. More separation meant more lines of lead, or increased leading.

Line spacing is one of the most expressive variables in typography and one that a designer must determine based on the use. A densely set book galley might have only a modest amount of leading between lines of text. Poetry is more likely to have ample leading between stanzas. An invitation’s line spacing is at the discretion of the designer (and their client); it will strongly contribute to the formality or attitude of the printed invitation.

Note: The key units of measure in typography are points and picas. There are 6 (PostScript) picas in an inch; there are 12 points in a pica; an inch is 72 points.

*Jim Felici’s Graphics.com article is excepted from his 2011 book The Complete Manual of Typography (Second Edition) from Adobe Press. The book is available from Peachpit Press.

America’s Got Talent is part of the deluge of talent competition shows that have overwhelmed US network television since American Idol debuted in 2002. This imperfect storm may have its roots in local television talent shows, but it’s mutated into a beast that has spawned many hideous offspring. The two people mostly responsible for this are both named Simon. Simon Fuller is the creator of the Pop Idol franchise, that has appeared in the US as American Idol. The other Simon is Simon Cowell, the former American Idol judge with his own successful global TV competition franchises– The X Factor and the worldwide array of Got Talent shows.

Other than their formula for generating revenue, there’s not a lot that’s smart about these shows. Their packaging is unabashedly garish. No amount of glitz, glitter and computer generated fireworks is too much. Even considering the G Factor (garish glitz and glitter), the America’s Got Talent logo is an especially egregious eyesore. It’s a ridiculously easy target for design criticism; it seems like a waste of breath to point out its clichés and grotesque typography. But monsters like this deserve to be skewered and put down, so here’s my stab at doing it right.

Arts and culture have much to do with what makes a society great. But these shows are to the arts what Ringling Brothers is to wildlife appreciation– cruel freak shows. With that in mind, I take particular offense to the way this show wraps itself in the iconography of what passes for patriotism in 2012. Using the American flag as a backdrop for this logo is an insult to real patriotism. I remember being taught as a Boy Scout to respect the flag as a solemn symbol of our nation. You weren’t to mistreat it. This is pornographic patriotism that defiles the flag. It is criminally ugly.

As a graphic designer I take responsibility to eschew ugliness. In defense of whomever created this, I also know what it’s like to work at a television network (in my case CBS) and to have clients who don’t share my aesthetics (rarely true at CBS). Restraint is a quality that’s not well-respected in Hollywood. So I can sympathize with the plight of the hands that pieced together the America’s Got Talent logo. Ugliness was nearly an inevitable outcome for this brand’s visual identity.

I would also assume that SYCOtv (Simon Cowell’s production company) were more responsible for this logo than was NBC, the network that paid for it. Simon Cowell became famous for his brutal honesty– so he deserves to be criticized with the same kind of bluntness. While I know this won’t hurt a man emboldened by his obscene wealth, he should know that this logo reflects poorly on his taste. It’s ugly in a way that is unforgivable. And the world should know that Simon Cowell is responsible for it.

Here are the Paste’s Top 20. The remaining 30 are below.

My biggest gripe about Jackson’s list is that many of these really don’t meet basic qualifications for a logo. Just because it’s been on an album cover, doesn’t grant it logo status. To be a logo or brand mark, it must be used consistently represent the band. There are a number of logos seen above that fail to meet that criterium. Pink Floyd’s paint scrawl (45) is from one album, The Wall. The Who’s barely legible conjoined letters and arrow (35) may have appeared on Keith Moon’s drum kit once upon a time, but it was never regularly used by the band. The only album covers that use the type treatment are a 1994 box set and hits compilations released since 2006. But, I suppose it’s recognizable enough to pass. The same goes for The Beatles (30) treatment familiar mostly from Ringo’s drum kit in A Hard Day’s Night and on Ed Sullivan. That treatment really got the most use during the 1996 Anthology mini-series and on the 2009 mono and stereo remasters. But it’s become so associated with the band (it’s on the Beatles website) that it’s achieved logo status.

Other questionable logos in Jackson’s bunch include Radiohead (05) and Nirvana (18)- these are more ancillary art than logos. I think Weezer’s logo is more the lower case Avant Garde typeface version of their name; I believe the flying W (36) was stolen from Waylon Jennings. The Bauhaus profile (22) is the emblem of the German Bauhaus art and design movement; it’s an appropriation of another entity’s logo. Nas’ logo (38) is just ugly; ditto Phish (07?!) and Ween (10). And who are Mastodon (49) or Vintage Trouble (40)?! Not that I care, their logos are ugly too.

Here is the XK9 selection for the Best 25 Band Logos.

While my list might seem a little heavy with 1970s selections, I would argue that time was the golden age of arena rock and band logos. I think Paste missed a few obvious choices like Boston (18), Cheap Trick (11), ELO (20) Styx (24) and yes, The Monkees (10). I’m particularly fond of a couple newer logos for Gorillaz (25) and Odd Future (23). I figure that if Dave Grohl is willing to tattoo the Foo Fighters double F (13) on the back of his neck, it deserves to be in this list.

I think the Rolling Stones’ tongue deserves to be number 1 without question. It’s the emblem of one of music’s biggest acts– it drips of sticky rock and roll. I also think the rest of the XK9 top ten is pretty strong, particularly the remainder of the top five– RUN DMC, Grateful Dead, Nine Inch Nails and AC/DC. All are potent brand marks. They exude the attitude and swagger, swoon, sting or strut of their respective bands. You can feel their mnemonic power.

…

1. The Ramones
2. Rolling Stones
3. Public Enemy
4. Grateful Dead
5. Radiohead
6. Wu-Tang Clan
7. Phish
8. Outkast
9. The Strokes
10. Ween
11. Deadmau5
12. Nine Inch Nails
13. Queen
14. The Pixies
15. Black Flag
16. Scissor Sisters
17. Le Zeppelin
18. Nirvana
19. Van Halen
20. Kiss
21. Sigur Ròs
22. Bauhaus
23. Abba
24. Yes
25. The XX
26. Misfits
27. Public Image Ltd
28. Sex Pistols
29. AC/DC
30. The Beatles
31. The Doors
32. Dead Kennedys
33. Aerosmith
34. Eminem
35. The Who
36. Weezer
37. Emerson Lake & Palmer
38. Nas
39. Ozzy Osbourne
40. Vintage Trouble
41. New York Dolls
42. Blitzen Trapper
43. Daft Punk
44. Red Hot Chili Peppers
45. Pink Floyd
46. The Cramps
47. Muse
48. RUN DMC
49. Mastodon
50. Metallica

(*denotes logos missing from Paste list)

1. Rolling Stones
2. RUN DMC
3. Grateful Dead
4. Nine Inch Nails
5. AC/DC
6. Public Enemy
7. Kiss
8. The Beatles
9. Black Flag
10. The Monkees*
11. Cheap Trick
12. Wu-Tang Clan
13. Foo Fighters*
14. Aerosmith
15. The Doors
16. Led Zeppelin
17. Yes
18. Boston*
19. The Ramones
20. ELO*
21. Van Halen
22. Metallica
23. Odd Future*
24. Styx*
25. Gorillaz*

The Avengers is a popcorn movie and it delivers in just about every way a Marvel fan could want. It is a potentially disastrous formula that was transformed into solid gold. The alchemist here is Joss Whedon, the Hollywood-meets-Comic-Con-demigod, and master of action-comedy storytelling. Whedon crafted a pitch-perfect comic book movie that respects the genre and knows its characters– as well as it knows its audience.

Each character in The Avengers is introduced in a way that allows them to establish their place in the story. Even Black Widow and Hawkeye are given pivotal roles to play to keep us from realizing that they’re the comics’ equivalent of bench warmers. We the audience are expected to know a little about these heroes and their history; we’re expected to arrive prepared. Marvel has given us 5 movies leading up to this one. Those weren’t prequels. They’re origin stories and adventures of the 4 main superheroes who aren’t made to wear S.H.I.E.L.D.’s bodysuits.

When it comes to DC vs Marvel, I’ve always been more a Marvel fan. I like the edge and humor of Marvel’s many personalities. And I love how Marvel has built a world crowded with superheroes and mutants who must form alliances. It’s led to a massive civil war that split them apart over ideological differences (on registry and control of all beings with powers). And now in the comics, it’s Cyclops and the Mutants versus Tony Stark, Cap, and a cast of thousands. This is gonna get messy.

When it came to putting Marvel on film, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man set a new standard. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series seems stagey and impotent in comparison. Ang Lee’s Hulk is an unmitigated, bouncing green wreck; Edward Norton’s version, only slightly better. The Fantastic Four had the same plastic film studio sheen of Raimi’s Spider-Man. I was not a fan of the Iron Man sequel, it was a tremendous waste of many talents, including Favreau. But in spite of some weaknesses, Kenneth Branagh’s epic Thor and Joe Johnston’s nostalgic Captain America put the Marvel film supertrain back on track.

With the exception of the Hulks between Bill Bixby and Mark Ruffalo, Marvel has had a fantastic run at casting perfection. Robert Downey Jr was a genius stroke that made these films rise above being thought of as children’s entertainment. He elevated the entire genre. And now they’ve finally found an actor suited to play Dr Bruce Banner, the wandering loner who turns into a “giant green rage monster.” Mark Ruffalo is excellent and the CG team behind the Hulk deserves undying respect for schooling those who went before and stumbled. But the Avengers’ best casting is Tom Hiddleston as Loki. I suppose credit there goes to Branagh and company.

Joss Whedon’s work on The Avengers is as close to flawless as any director of this film could be. He managed the collection of costumed, muscle-bound freaks and made a hugely entertaining film.

Shawarma!

The same inflection can be expressed typographically with the use of both a question mark and an exclamation point, most commonly in that order. Speckter thought one character could do the work of two. Speckter made his proposition for the new punctuation in Type Talks, the journal of the Advertising Typographers Association that he edited from 1959 to 1968. He solicited suggestions for designs and names ultimately deciding on the name interrobang, and design seen here. The name is a compound word grafted from the Latin interrogatio and bang, printers’ slang for the exclamation mark. The mark itself is a grafted hybrid of exclamation and question marks. And it’s butt ugly.

Speckter’s proposed interrobang was well-received in New York advertising and publishing circles. As an ad man, Martin Speckter’s agency worked primarily for New York newspapers including the Wall Street Journal. He claimed that his association with the WSJ had no influence on a business editorial lauding the proposed punctuation. The Remington typewriter company included an interrobang key on its 1968 Model 25 electric typewriter.

This blush of early enthusiasm subsided and the mark became an obscure bit of typographic trivia. Robert Bringhurst omits mention of the interrobang in The Elements of Typographic Style. The interrobang’s inclusion in digital typefaces is rare. It is included in the typeface Georgia, used in this post, and in the version of Helvetica provided on Macs. But there is no interrobang in any of the other 9 faces in FontShop’s top 10 of its Best 100 Typefaces list.

I admire Martin Speckter’s efforts and I appreciate his desire for economy in typographic expression. Yet I believe the interrobang is a bit of typographic folly. Its form seems to illustrate that it’s an unnecessary mark. The interrobang design represents both a question and an exclamation. That sort of statement isn’t one thing, it’s two things– a question expressed emphatically. The use of multiple or compound characters in type isn’t exactly rare: three dots (periods) make up the ellipsis… (four dots if it ends a sentence); colons and semicolons are compound characters.

The argument for a need for this hybrid character hardly seems valid. In fact, it creates more problems than the one it solves. The infrequency of rhetorical exclamations makes a mark like this stand out in a way that inhibits typographic communication. Its design creates a dense character with little counter space that ultimately make it appear blacker than surrounding text. It disrupts the harmony of a well-balanced type design, distracting from effective communication.

This endeavor reminds me of the popular quest for a typographic solution to express sarcasm. The use of italics might help in this sort of designation, but it’s asking a bit much of common-use typography to adopt a voice in this way. I would argue that emphasis and intent should come from what is written, rather than how it is typeset. If, in conversational communication (e.g. texting, email), you find that you need a typographic form to express what you are feeling, you are looking to the wrong tool to solve your problem.

Unless you’re a graphic designer, of course.

This post referenced Keith Houston’s excellent blog Shady Characters and Wikipedia.

Two of my heroes have returned in print editions of children’s books they illustrated.

Saul Bass and Paul Rand are two legends of graphic design and visual thinking. Bass was lauded as a filmmaker by no less an authority than Martin Scorsese, but his approach was always that of a graphic designer. He sought to distill ideas and messages into simple evocative images, marks, and illustrations. That showed in his brand marks for AT&T, United Airlines and the Girl Scouts as well as his film titles for Scorsese, Hitchcock and Preminger.

Bass’s genius can also be seen in Henri Walks to Paris. Bass illustrated the tale written by Lenore Klein. In the book a French boy decides to set off for Paris on foot, only to be foiled by a small bird and a large pencil. Spoiler alert– he gets home OK.

Bass’s illustrations, originally published in 1962, are as fresh as ever. They have that signature Bass style of collage and simple drawings; they embrace of typography as an element of illustration and illuminator of the story. This 2012 edition comes from Universe Publishing. I am repurposing the images here to encourage you to buy the book. I wrote that last sentence to discourage Universe from suing me.

Paul Rand remains an icon graphic design. Steve Jobs mentions him warmly in Walter Isaacson’s biography. His gravitas taught Steve a lesson of how an expert should present themselves to their clients and the world. With his work for Dubbonet, IBM and others, Rand showed that playful and professional were not mutually exclusive. His illustrated children’s books show a similar idea, that childlike wonder and sophisticated images can also be harmonious.

Rand illustrated three children’s books written by his wife Ann. They are available in print thanks to Chronicle Books. Sparkle and Spin (1957) was re-created in 2006, and I Know a Lot of Things (1956) was re-released in 2009.