Thursday, January 19, 2012

So close

Congratulations, DC, for changing your mind.

Well, did you change your mind, or did somebody get sacked or replaced and the new person decided you needed a new identity?

In any case, I should offer you hearty congratulations for coming up with a logo that would support being rendered in the primary colors one associates with comic books.

I should congratulate you, but I won't, because you clearly don't intend to use it that way, and it's purely accidental that it does work so well. See above right for an example of what I mean by that, since your designers apparently didn't think of it.

LATER: I hear there's been a small internet explosion over the fact that the cover mockups include an image of a clear post-New 52 Batman numbered #708. What it says to me is that the decision to re-do the corporate identity came from a different office than the decision to restart numbering. It might even indicate that the new corporate logo has been essentially a done deal waiting for the right moment to announce for quite a long time. Why now? Well, because they've had the press releases ready for a while, just waiting for the news to leak (which it just did), so now's the time to make it look like an actual plan instead of an accident.

And I see from the mockups that the logo will bleed off the left edge of the cover. Interesting.

LATER STILL: GeekDad points out that this new design is a departure from the continuity apparent in every previous DC logo back to 1940 (even including the briefly-used AA bullet). He calls it a clear indication of a "new regime in control", and that seems right to me. (See also SignalNoise.)

But everything adds up to the new DC wanting to be known as an entertainment company, not a *shudder* comic book company, which makes my color treatment highly unlikely indeed.

I mean, if I owned Superman, I'd be reminding the world of it at every possible opportunity, and one way I'd do that is to happily use his uniform colors on my corporate logo.

3 comments:

Budd said...

maybe it will look cooler animated at the beginning of their movies, but I don't think so.

wheatgerm said...

I like thelogo

Anonymous said...

Wow, what a piece of crap. And they paid big bucks for it, too. It doesn't read well, doesn't color well -- it's what an ad agency thinks a comic logo should be, in the most throw-away, condescending terms. No surprises here, and it will probably change again fairly soon.