A Crashing the Web Special Report
Anyone else feel like a nice, refreshing glass of Tropicana?
I sure did, after laying eyes on Comedy Central's newly re-designed logo (officially debuting in January). The sparse, corporate nothing of a brand identity reminded me instantly of the citrus titan's botched attempt last year to sex up its product by dressing it down.
Consumers rallied, turning back the bland, Web 2.0 tide of IKEA-food-court-marquee soullessness that had threatened to infect their beloved OJ cartons.
Now we must contend—for the moment—with a new Comedy Central logo so baffling and inappropriate that, were it not for the snow on the ground, it might have fooled me into thinking it’s April 1st. Bob Salazar, who holds the cosmically impossible title of Senior Vice President of Brand Creative for the channel, said that the new look is meant to make the Comedy Central brand more modern; specifically, the suits want their trademark to stand out on various social media outlets, such as iPads and Facebook, which convey identity via microscopic avatars.
While the look that has already been described as an errant copyright symbol might indeed stand out better than the classic cityscape-on-a-word-balloon-planetoid logo, it in no way reads to the layman as representing comedy. This is just the letter “C” trapped inside a partially eaten circle.
And for those disgusting apologists who insist that the spirit of irreverence lives on in the full logo—with the word “Central” spelled upside down and backwards—fuck yourselves. That’s exactly the kind of swill one might expect of fat, ivory tower business majors who fancy themselves creative types. “Ooooh, edgy! It’s flipped! It's backwards! Isn’t that hilarious? Get marketing on the phone; we got ourselves a winnaaaah!”
Besides, if the whole point of the re-design is to promote the simplified “C”, then your precious backwards type won’t even be visible outside the Comedy Central homepage. Readers are more likely to think of the copyright symbol or the second-to-last option on a Scantron test than they are of The Daily Show or Ugly Americans.
I’ll admit that half of my anger comes from the logo and half comes from the fact that it represents what I see as a gross shift in the world of design. All of this simplification and clean edges—the Mac-ing of popular art—makes me really nervous. The personality and passion is being sucked out of our graphics culture in favor of stark Web pages with big, blocky type and candy-colored icon buttons. One would think that instead of evolving into a sophisticated race of super-users, we’re collectively reverting to a Playskool mentality.
Then again, I don’t know much about anything outside of the movies. But I recognize a bad fad when I see it, which is why I’ve spent nearly 500 words venting about a piece of glorified indicia. Could someone please remind the suits that they’re running a cable channel with the word “Comedy” in its name, and that there is nothing more antithetical to comedy than the buttoned-down, bullshit concerns of business?
It’s bad enough that when The Daily Show got a set makeover some years ago, the geniuses in Branding decided to prop up John Stewart’s desk with a none-too-subtle fiberglass replica of the AT&T logo (this is conjecture, of course), but at least that can be avoided if you watch the TV with part of your hand covering your face.
This logo is one step too far in the wrong direction. I hope that someday I’ll stumble across it in a Google search and chuckle at the faded memory of that crazy week when Comedy Central let slip a really, really bad joke.