Nickelodeon has recently redesigned their main logo and all of the logos for their individual brands. I’m particularly fond of the lettering in the new logo. It’s quite well done and manages to look more clean and professional than the old one while still having a soft and playful aesthetic. I quite like the dot on the i.

Brand New has a great write up of the new logo. Part of the challenge was to find a logo that worked across a wide variety of mediums. I really like the logo in the videos on the Brand New site. It comes across as soft and squishy and just generally very playful.

As far as the channel identities, I think that the nick jr. one is by far the most successful. I do dislike the Teen Nick logo however. I’ve been struggling to figure out why but I just can’t put my finger on it. Besides what I feel is an unfortunate color combination, there’s something else about it that just doesn’t sit right. Perhaps it just doesn’t feel “edgy” enough to appeal to teens?

Overall I think the logo change is very successful. All of the individual treatments for each channel are unique while still very much feeling a part of the greater identity.

A response to the new Pepsi logo from Lawrence Yang:

This is what I think whenever I see one of the new Pepsi ads.

Simply amazing.

I happen to work right next to MassArt and often find myself waiting for the bus in front of the college. A week or two ago, I noticed a sign sporting the new MassArt logo:

I literally, with watery eyes, gazed at the way the ‘A’ crops the ‘S’, and thought to myself: “It’s beautiful.” I then immediately chastised myself for having such an emotional reaction to a piece of typography and resumed continued reading my Howard Zinn book.

Brand New has an excellent review of new branding and logo in MassTerful Identity. The article also features a lot of excellent photographs of signage and marketing material. Also, it appears as though a complete overhaul of the MassArt website is in the works (thank God). I can’t wait to see what they do with the new one.

Score one for KJ’s alma mater!

I was pleased to see a review today in Brand New about the new Animal Planet logo.

Just as the author of the critique mentions, I was watching the Puppy Bowl last sunday and noticed the new logo. Every time I saw it, it gave me a little jolt. Not really in a good way either. I kept thinking to myself “What is that?”

Perhaps it was really just the two Bloody Mary’s that caused me to find the look of the logo so jarring. I dunno. That M is really bad though. It just looks like a mess. No matter how many times I look at the logo, I have to actually think to realize the word is ‘animal’ and not ‘ani al’ or ‘ani3al.’ I bet my old Typography professor would have a fit over this one.

I’ve been trying to refrain from commenting on the new Adobe Photoshop logo because it seems that everybody else already has:

• Photoshop gets a new logo (comments)
• See What’s Possible
• Photoshop 2.0: The Wrong Kind of 2.0

The first three things that came to my mind when I saw the new logo were:

1. Ew
2. Microsoft
3. This is a joke right?

Nothing very groundbreaking there. I haven’t read of a single person liking it, and many have also pointed out how similar it looks Microsoft designs. While I thought Microsoft in the back of my head, I didn’t actually bother to go look at any Microsoft stuff to compare. That is…until Armin Vit linked to one for comparison.

Yikes. I decided to go back to the Photoshop website for some further comparison. As it turns out, there’s some very lovely¹ Microsoft-esque marketing videos. The thing that really caught my eye was the whole silhouetted people concept. It reminded me of something…oh wait! I know! People_Ready!

I just don’t get what Adobe is trying to achieve here (other than cheapening their brand)². It seems like just a couple of months ago that Adobe went through that whole CS3 re-branding thing. While I don’t think that it was 100% successful, at least it did unify the suite in a unique way. Those little color bricks have grown on me, although I still have an awfully hard time telling which one is which. The only one I can remember is that Dreamweaver is green, but then again…Dreamweaver has always been green. Anyway, enough said on my part. Read Armin Vit’s article for a more articulate analysis.’

1. Insert sarcasm here.↩
2. One could at least hope for a drastic price cut to follow. 🙂↩