Logo round-up: March 2019

A late, but substantial logo round-up for March 2019. This one includes over 60 new projects from around the world. This includes new logos for the Irish postal service, food conglomerate Mars, the Norwegian railways, ad agency DDB and many others.

Strong and simple design for ORF1

ORF1 is one on the main channels from Austrian broadcaster ORF. Yesterday (April 26), it launched a new logo and visual system. It was designed by Norwegian design agency Bleed and local agency Partlhewson. Bleed has previous experience designing for their national broadcaster NRK.

ORF1 differs from ORF2 in that it skews a bit younger and it somewhat more entertainment-oriented. The new look is heavily built around the simple new logo, created out of four stacked squares. The logo swipes in and out on screen, as does most of the flat graphics, all to great effect. The varied programming genres are defined by different colours. A custom typeface, called Eins Sans, was also created.

Transparent refresh for Aqua d'Or

Aqua d'Or is a leading brand of mineral water in Denmark, now owned by Danone. Back in 2016 the brand was redesigned by Kontrapunkt. Back in February 2018, the brand was redesigned once again, also by Kontrapunkt. Kontrapunkt has since moved Aqua d'Or and its other packaging clients to a sub-agency called Everland, which has continued developing the brand as the product line expanded.

The 2016 redesign cleaned up Aqua d'Or, making it more attractive with a new bottle. The new logo keeps the clean blue circle as its label, but introduced new typography where the ascender of the lowercase Q has cleverly been used as the apostrophe in "d'Or".

From 1999: Court TV by Lee Hunt Associates

Founded in 1991 to air non-stop courtroom proceedings, Court TV rose to prominence in the sleazier period of the '90s where numerous trials dominated American news. It would then spend a decade trying to get away from that reputation to feature more documentary-style programming, before finally changing its name to truTV.

One of the first attempt to broaden the network's remit was the 1999 rebrand by Lee Hunt Associates that saw the introduction of the thumbprint logo. The project was headed by creative director Bob English and designer Kylie Matulick.

In addition to the thumbprint logo, the team also created a series of idents based on still photography, with knives, guns and other crime scene objects for the night-time programming and scales and law books for the courtroom proceedings during the day.

TV4 brings niche channels in line

Sweden's largest commercial TV channel TV4 streamlined its offerings last year, standardising the logos of its main channels. (Read more about it here.) This streamlining was recently applied to TV4's niche channels for documentaries, films and classic TV, namely TV4 Fakta, TV4 Film and TV4 Guld.

These three channels used to have their own identities, with differently shaped logos. Now, they all use the main TV4 logo with simple descriptive text. TV4 has scaled back its investment in niche channels and closed down some underperforming ones recently, and this logo change helps reinforce that strategy.