The Television Academy gets a proper identity

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is an American institution dedicated to advancement and acknowledgement of television, best known for organising the Emmy Awards. The organisation itself has had a somewhat muted identity, often using the Emmy statue as its symbol. That changed this month when the Academy got its own visual identity, created with Siegel+Gale.

The new logo adopts the name "Television Academy" which has long been used as shorthand name. They also created a series of light trails that support the logo.

ERA Real Estate sells new house logo

ERA Real Estate is an international residential real estate franchise. It is based in the United States where it was founded in 1971 as Electronic Realty Associates, but has since expanded to about 2,300 offices around the world with a significant amount of them located outside the US. This week it unveiled a new visual identity which it says will launch in July.

The new logo is said to be the fourth in the company's history and just like its predecessors it is inspired by the typical image of a house. The basic colours are also retained.

SFR cleans the square

SFR is one of France's leading mobile telecommunications companies. It was originally known Société Française du Radiotéléphone and is currently owned by media group Vivendi who are currently discussing selling it to another company. This week SFR introduced a refreshed logo, accompanied by the slogan Smart comme vous ("Smart as you").

The various bevels, drop shadows and flares from the old logo have been removed. What remains is a clean (dare I say "flat"?) red square with seemingly unaltered lettering. This seems to be simply a logo refresh, the overall look and feel remains essentially unchanged.

Logo round-up: February 2014

Here's the logo round-up for February. Usually a slow month for rebrands, made even less busy by the interruption from the Winter Olympics. But still, there were quite a few interesting project revealed.

Genoa's new logo hints at more

After Bologna in December and Florence last week, Genoa has become the third large Italian city to reveal a new city brand in a short time. Genoa is Italy's sixth largest city and the capital of Liguria in northern Italy. The logo was revealed yesterday, March 19, and was created by Valeria Morando and Anna Giudice who run a studio called 7vicocrema. They won a competition that attracted 373 proposals.

The new logo doesn't feature any city monuments and instead relies on typography. The letterforms are partly obscured, suggesting that there is more to Genoa than you've already seen, which is amplified by the tagline "More than this". Chopping off the tops and bottoms of the letters G and O also created brackets that can be used in other contexts.

New names and graphics for Time Warner Cable News channels

Last December, the American cable TV company Time Warner Cable rebranded the sixteen local news channels its owns in several locations where it does business. Having previously used several different names, they would now all be called "Time Warner Cable News". Controversially, this also included New York's popular local news channel NY1, which would now be called Time Warner Cable News NY1.

The stated reason for this change was to communicate to viewers that Time Warner Cable is the exclusive providers of these channels and that they will loose access to them if they cut the cord. By adding the name to the channels, the cable provider associates itself with trustworthy local news.

Whatever you may think of the wordy names, the new graphics package should be judged by its own merits. It was created by Los Angeles-based Troika. The slick package spans an immense list of delivered assets, including news graphics and specific show graphics.

OBH Nordica designs better logo

OBH Nordica is a Nordic manufacturer of household appliances and utensils, formed in 2002 from the merger of a Swedish and a Danish company. Last month, the company introduced a new visual identity and package concept. It ws created by Stockholm-based design agency Silver.