It’s MTV, Minus the “Music Television”
For the first time in 29 years MTV’s Iconic Logo Gets a Facelift
Just twenty-five years ago, MTV was best known for airing ground-breaking music videos starring musical icons such as Michael Jackson and Madonna. Nowadays, its MTV’s reigning queen is not a recording star at all but rather reality t.v. stars, such as Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the wild party girl from the hit reality series “Jersey Shore” and the girls of the drama-filled series ”The Hills”.
So maybe it is not too shocking that the network bowed to the inevitable and finally erased the legendary tagline “Music Television” off its corporate logo. The new logo design was a belated acknowledgment of what has been obvious for years: MTV has evolved into a reality channel that occasionally runs programs that have to do with music. Ditching the longstanding “music television” tag line seems like a signal that the network has accepted where it now stands.
The new logo was done in-house but the original logo was done by Frank Olinsky. According to Olinsky, the logo was meant to always change:
” [When] asked to come up with the “corporate colors” for the logo. The decision was made that there weren’t any, and that the logo should always change. Knowing that many animators, designers, ad agencies, etc. were going to be working with the logo made them think how, just like rock music always changes, the logo should also. This was a concept that had never been used on a logo before. The “M” and the “TV” could be made of any colors and/or materials.”
The new three-dimensional design is essentially a cropped version of the original one, leaving out the tag line ‘music television’. This cropping gives the logo a wider proportion that is in a ratio of 6 by 4, the same as a standard photograph. This design feature allows the logo to be used to display imagery as a fill. The new look, features the original 3-D large “M” with the small, graffiti-style “tv” on the right side. But the new design is expanded, so that photos of MTV talent, including the cast of “Jersey Shore,” “The Buried Life” and “My Life as Liz,” can be seen through it.
“We were really thinking about it in terms of having the brand and our talent living in the same space together,” Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and multiplatform creative projects, told The News.
“If you watch the channel, you’ve seen that it’s definitely going in a new direction,” said Exarhos. “We really wanted to see the logo featured in a new way, and this was really meant to be able to house all the great things that are happening at MTV at any given time.”
Exarhos said the network started thinking about an overall logo redesign at the end of last year. While other aspects of MTV had evolved, the logo was always something that had stayed the same, and talk of updating it seemed almost blasphemous.
“I’ve been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic,” Exarhos said. “It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.”
“From a truly design perspective, we didn’t look at losing ‘music television’ for any other reason than from a functionality standpoint,” said Exarhos. “But we realized that it would have an impact if we took that off. I think those who watch MTV today think about it as much broader than music television. Music is still at the heart of everything we do, but it’s about a lot more now,” she added. “If MTV didn’t change, we’d be irrelevant.”
Frank Olinsky and his team at Manhattan Design created the MTV logo when the network launched. When the change was announced, Olinsky wasn’t feeling much nostalgia. “I had no idea” the change was coming, said Olinsky. “MTV now is a whole other reality than MTV was back in the day. Things change. The fact that it doesn’t say ‘music television’ anymore, that’s appropriate.”
So is the new logo a redesign or a logo that was born to always change? What are your thoughts on the new tagline for MTV?
Tags: corporate logo, logo design, logo redesign, mtv logo, web design
March 29th, 2010 at 10:38 am
[...] are many famous logos that were created using the tag team design method, including the recently redesigned iconic MTV Logo, which was originally designed by Frank Olinsky and a team of designers.At the Net Impact, we [...]
May 24th, 2010 at 10:07 am
[...] are many famous logos that were created using the tag team design method, including the recently redesigned iconic MTV Logo, which was originally designed by Frank Olinsky and a team of designers.At the Net Impact, we [...]
June 8th, 2010 at 12:15 am
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