Logo round-up: July 2019

A smaller, but nice crop of new logos from July, including the French football league, several non-profit foundations and Russian telco MTS.

From 1999: Discovery Health by Pittard Sullivan

In our series on forgotten rebrands, we take a look at the relaunch of the fledgling cable network Discovery Health in 1999.

Discovery Health had first launched as a digital channel in 1998, but Discovery felt the concept had greater potential as a basic analogue network. With a serious increase in distribution and hundreds of millions spent on programming, they retooled and relaunched the network completely in August 1999.

It may have been an analogue TV network, but this was 1999 so it needed to have a serious Internet connection. Major investment was put into the website which presented a reported 2.5 million pages. As a result, the overall look of the network is very "connected" and informative.

The agency in charge at the time was Pittard Sullivan, the leading broadcast design agency of the '90s. The work at Pittard Sullivan was led by Curt Doty, a veteran of broadcast design.

Red Bee creates geometric look for TV5 Finland

TV5 is the flagship entertainment channel of Discovery Networks Finland, launched in 2008 and then going on to become reasonably popular. Last month, on August 1, it launched a completely new logo and graphics package, created by Red Bee Creative.

Up until now, the Finnish TV5 has used the logo and graphics of its Swedish equivalent, Kanal 5, which is owned by the same company. The new logo keeps the successful 5-in-a-circle theme, but gets a new numeral.

The new '5' is composed of a circle and two rectangles, with minimal adjustment. The geometric theme echoes throughout the design, with graphics featuring squares and rectangles.

Delirious rebrand for Canal J

Founded in 1985, Canal J is not only the oldest kids TV channel in France but also one of the older non-terrestrial TV channels overall. On August 23, it introduced new graphics and a refreshed logo, created by motion branding agency Motionfanclub. That agency was also behind the previous logo, introduced in 2015 and covered here at the time.

According to Motionfanclub, the new graphic package builds on "dynamic youth" for kids approaching adolescence. "Sport, digital delirium and complicity is on the programme", according to my French translation.

A subtler S for Sony TV channels

Sony Pictures Television is the broadcasting arm of Sony Pictures, owning a variety of channels in Asia, the Americas and Europe. Some are operated under names like AXN and Animax, others use the Sony brand. At the moment, new branding is being rolled out for the Sony channels in Latin America and the United Kingdom.

One thing that makes these new logos interesting, is the pedigree of the one they replace. Sony's first major venture into international television was the launch of Sony Entertainment Television in 1995. For this, they contracted Chermayeff & Geismar to come up with symbol. C&G's solution featured an S partly visible through a box. In the following couple of decades, this symbol has been through a large amount of variations and treatments, being used for an eclectic mix of entertainment channels in India and other parts of Asia as well as Latin America, the United Kingdom and other areas.

The new logos are app-style squares with rounded corners, featuring a curve as a subtle reminder of the old S. They were first revealed in January 2018 for the streaming service Crackle, which Sony ironically sold earlier this year.

The new logos were announced for the UK channels on July 24 as part of a major relaunch that will see Sony reconfigure their offering into three movie channels (Sony Movies, Sony Movies Action, Sony Movies Classic) and one entertainment channel (Sony Channel). A couple week later, on August 12, Sony Channel in Latin America adopted the same logo, although that appears to be a straight rebrand. The UK launch is scheduled for September 10.