Oh we do it so often I've lost count how many times I smugly walk into a situation with ego carrying my aloft over the crowds of undesigned neanderthals all using comic sans or that horrible font from the Avatar poster. I descend into the situation with a firmly placed. "Well I think -" and I promptly receive looks of death from everyone in the room.
Don't worry if it seems like I'm rambling. Because I am. What I'm getting on about is how all us designers like to have opinions, so. what am I being opinionated about?
Seems the good folk at DC have unveiled...something. I think it's their new logo. It seems they've been trying to radically alter themselves over the last few months and give themselves a new face. They rebooted all their comics creating 52 new comics, some good, some bad, some pointless. But now they have unloaded a new logo at us. It seems odd that they would do this some five months after they had this paradigm shift. But what do I know about the comic book industry?
So, the logo in question. Short answer. - I don't like it.
Long answer - I really don't like it.
Okay, perhaps I should elaborate.
It's nice. And a creative idea, it's also a big step away from what DC have had as their logo for some fifty plus years.
Dc's evolving stamp logo has been around for donkey's years, eventually evolving into the spinning star. Here's the thing about these logos. None of them actually contain the words comic. And there is a reason for that. Anyone care to tell us that DC standards for?
Detective Comics. - from the original publication of Batman. So, yes Detective Comics is now "Detective Comics comics."
Smooth.
Of course people have been calling it DC comics for years out of sense of habit, like Marvel comics, or Image comics, but when you actually start putting it in the logo, it sort of gives the impression that you don't actually anything about the company your designing for. Hence why I don' think this really does look like a comic book company logo. Well I suppose the logo has strengths. For starters. The personality of the logo, well it hasn't got much. If any at all, it's more about the ways that it can be altered to fit the comics it's working for. It feels very tacked on less of a design feature and more something to help it feel less bland. And that's it's only real strength - ironically also being it's weakness. The logo lacks any real sense of personality and individuality. Yes they can make it glow like a power ring, yes you can have the bloody smear from the Watchmen, but outside of that. What is the logo in it's neutral form? If I want to by a product from DC, will it have just a plain format of this logo? Or is there going to be mass micromanaging of the logo for every product?
I'm all for giving a logo of sense of continuity with a specific branch of it's creations, but at the same time it should have a just as recognisable neutral form. There's also the problem that it feels very amateurish. It's not pushing the envelope with it's ideas and staying rather neutral. Peel away the gimmick and all you have is a simple peeling D idea with a C under it. Of course they are comics, nay Epic Page turning comics! But it feels like something a college student would turn in with their own personal project of rebranding DC, it's weak. It's corporate and doesn't leap out at me. None of these logos say that it's it a company with a history, this was the company that brought me such things as Year One, All Star Superman, the Killing Joke. It tells me that they have a big roster, sure, but none of the above images makes me think of a man from Krypton, the dreaded Batman. Well that's unless they open some sort of law firm.
The fact that your logo says DC, and then you have DC comics under it, well that is unnecessary type for a start. It makes the logo unbalanced and makes me wonder if the people who designed this where so worried that people wouldn't recognise the logo they had to put in a new section that tells people the obvious.
When even the designers who are working on this lack the faith in their logos. It's a good sign that you should scrap it and go back to the drawing board.
As I troll through the internet looking for information on this new logo I come across a little line about the logo. Sadly this quote has no name attached to it so I can't say if this is genuinely from someone in DC of if it was in fact their sort of buzz word for when they where working on the logo. But anyway, said quote is this.
"re-capture the older branding"
Now I've got to stop and scratch my head here for a second. Older branding. Incase you've forgotten, scroll back up to the top of the page and look and new ones, then, scroll back down and look at the older ones. Go on, I'll wait for you.
Okay, so if you feel that this is totally justified, please tell me, correct me. The internet is full of conflicting opinions on how someone can be so wrong, draw me a flow chart, give me a diagram. Hell just tell me I'm crazy. Because that isn't what I see. The older logos? They actually remind me of something else. They make me think of a big rubber stamp. (Well not so much the 05 to 12, but stay with me here) They feel like this big seal of approval. As if it was a certified product, as if this product was so awesome it has been awarded the highest honour of receiving this stamp. Of course that's blatant nostalgia talking since Dc has turned out as much tripe as any other comic company, but it's the idea behind it. This logo feels like like a seal of approval and more like a business card logo - as if Green Lantern hands these out after defeating Sinestro. "Do you have what it takes to join the GL corps?"
I digress. Really, I could summarise this ramble with a simple opinion. It's amateurish at best, it lacks the power of even the dignity of the classic brands. It feels more like a cheep marketing tool rather than a thought out logo crafted to make us think of the history and the creativity of this brand. (Of course the classic logos had that with a big hit and miss factor, but hey, now would have been a good chance to do so.)
It's certainly not lacking imagination in parts. Time and effort needed to be put into this. When handling this logo it needed to be done with more expert care. This wasn't it.
Well that's my opinionated blog post done for the afternoon, if you made sense of this. Well done! Feel free to comment bellow on what you think of the logo, be it good bad, and hey while your there what would you liked to have seen as a new logo? It's got to be better than this one.
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