Opinion BY Armin

Normal is the New Rare

Judging from the amount of e-mails we received about this redesign, it seems we have a healthy community of gamers among Brand New readers and, as a former gamer myself, I am happy to oblige. Even more so when it comes to a game developer that enabled many hours of personal enjoyment with games like the addictive Marble Madness or one of the earlier basketball games, Jordan vs. Bird: One-on-One. Rare is a British company that has been a big part of the development of the gaming industry since the late 1970s, when it produced 8-bit games and has since developed games for all the major consoles. Rare was bought by Microsoft in 2002. Yesterday, as part of their 25th anniversary, Rare announced a new look.

Continue reading this entry

INTL. REVIEW BY PAUL VICKERS POSTED BY Brand New

Moulin Rouge does the Typographic Cancan

As French as the Eiffel Tower or Champagne, the Moulin Rouge Cabaret is an integral part of the history and culture of France and has been on the sightseeing trail of visitors since it was founded in 1889, in the Pigalle red light district, close to Montmartre, Paris. Birthplace of the famous Cancan dance, the red Windmill on its roof is a landmark on the city’s horizon and an iconic symbol of cabaret and nightlife worldwide. Long associated with the avant-garde and leading artists, with some of its early posters designed by none other than Toulouse-Lautrec, the Moulin Rouge has a long design heritage but was in dire need of an overhaul, having drifted into a popular, mass market experience with a cheap and tacky product image. The 120th anniversary of the Moulin Rouge is the occasion to roll out a new brand identity that pays homage to the legend and communicates the magic with a resolutely contemporary brand. Four agencies competed in the in the design pitch, proposing over 40 different proposals, according to this interview with the eventual winners, Paris-based agency John Brightman.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

New Kid Channel Looks Like Not Much Fun

In the upcoming 2010 TV fall season, a new channel aimed at the 6 – 12-year-old demographic will be launched by the partnership of Discovery Communications and Hasbro. The former brings the TV experience through 100-plus worldwide networks like Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, and Science Channel; while the latter, well, they bring the fun and the merchandise with kid franchises like Transformes, My Little Pony and Tonka. The new channel, named The Hub, will be competing against established channels like Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Cartoon Network, but the combination of Discovery and Hasbro seems like a powerful one.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

MTV: More TV, Less M

Last year, exactly around this time, when we were thinking about what brand to spoof on April Fools MTV was the runner-up, but only because we thought no one would ever believe that the MTV logo would change. Ever. Now that the time of change is finally here — almost 29 years after MTV and its logo, debuted on August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., to that unmistakable guitar riff — well, not much has really changed, other than what we all already knew. MTV is not about music anymore, and its new logo dispenses with the hindering description of “Music Television.”

Continue reading this entry

InTL. REVIEW BY Alexander Iosad POSTED BY Brand New

Russian TV, Squared

Russia 1 (Rossiya 1 in Russian, formerly simply Rossiya) is one of the main TV channels in Russia. Like much of Russian TV, it is controlled by the state – in this case through direct ownership, as it is a part of VGTRK (All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company). VGTRK also owns a number of other channels, and the new logos attempt to give a single identity to the company’s TV empire. They succeed – the new identity, unveiled just before the New Year’s Eve, is uniformly bland and uninspiring.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

IGN, it’s Mantastic!

Every month more than 14 million unique individuals generate over 231 million pageviews at ign.com (IGN, or Imagine Games Network for long), and a chest-hair-raising amount of those individuals are, you guessed it, men, 86% of them. They are under 30 years old and, somehow, manage to pull in an average of $68,000 a year in income. That, my friends, is a devoted following — with money to spend. IGN provides a haven of video game news, reviews, previews and message boards for every platform, Xbox, Playstation, Wii and more. IGN takes its namesake from its parent company, IGN Entertainment (featuring a cool new web site), which also owns AskMen and Rotten Tomatoes, and in turn, it is owned by another major media player, News Corporation. Earlier this week, IGN Entertainment announced a new logo for its popular website and also refreshed its corporate image.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

Paging Doctor Who

I apologize in advance. I am not a Dr. Whovian, and the only things that come to mind when I think of Doctor Who is the long scarf worn by Tom Baker (1974 – 1981), and the fabulously groundbreaking opening title sequence by Bernard Lodge in 1963. So, I will try to skip as many details as possible so as not to get anything too wrong or get lambasted by true fans. The basics, then: Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction program, having first aired in 1963, and it follows the adventures of “the Doctor,” a time traveler who, in lieu of changing actors, has the ability to regenerate itself any time he dies, allowing the writers and show producers to subtly reinvent the character and let each new actor embody the Doctor’s persona — as part of the metamorphosis, a new logo (either drastically changed or just revised) is introduced as well. A visual retrospective can be found here. To this point, ten actors have played the Doctor and next Spring an eleventh doctor will take to the screen. The BBC yesterday unveiled the new logo and, based on the more than a dozen e-mails I received about this, it looks like the show’s fans are as ardent as ever.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

New Nick

Whatever this says about me I am going to go ahead and say it regardless: Nickelodeon was a big part of my upbringing, childhood and overall initial exposure to the way of the American psyche. Growing up in Mexico City, we had a UFO-sized satellite dish atop our house that grabbed American channels, and among my favorite was Nickelodeon. It started with Double Dare and You can’t do that on Television — this, of course, meant slime, greener than any booger I could have ever picked from my young nose. Then, as a beginner teenager in the early 1990s came Rugrats, Doug and the transcendental Ren and Stimpy. There were also live action programs, but at the moment, those escape me. Needless to say, I was kid, and Nickelodeon was a channel for me. Over the years I moved on to MTV, Cinemax (ahem) and ESPN. I grew up and Nickelodeon wasn’t for me anymore. It hasn’t been for more than fifteen years I presume. And if you are reading this at your own free will, it means that it’s not for you anymore either. On top of all this, if you are, again, reading this it means you are aware of the recent introduction of a new Nickelodeon logo that usurped not just design blogs but mainstream pop culture ones that, in unison, mourned the metamorphosis-happy orange logo that now, as grown men and women, represents everything that is lame with kids today — a far cry from their own childhood.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

Guitar Hero Grows Up

It’s easy to boast when making utopian pronouncements, but I can so guarantee that, if I were playing video games today with the same fanatical fervor as I did in my teenage years (homework and tests be damned), I would be a master at these newfangled games of faking an actual talent — after all, I killed in Madden and NHL without ever catching a football or hitting a puck in real life — and I would be playing the guitar like a Rock God that can press buttons really, really fast. Seriously I would. But, alas, Guitar Hero, or its competitor Rock Band, are two or three generations removed from my free time. Now, instead of being excited about a video game release and getting in line at the crack of dawn, I’m giddy about its logo. Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, designers Joe Marianek and Kai Salmela, along with a cadre of image-makers have revamped Guitar Hero to rockin’ heights.

Continue reading this entry

Opinion BY Armin

Withering Flower

The AmericanLife TV Network — previously known as the Nostalgia Channel first and GoodLife TV Network later — was originally launched in 1985 to serve the viewing needs of baby boomers, showing mostly reruns of series from the late 1950s, 60s and early 70s like The Honeymooners, The Bob Newhart Show and Mission: Impossible. In 2001 the Unification Church purchased the network and maintained the baby boomer programming, but a new approach is set to take over the network this fall as ComStar Media Fund — an organization led by televangelist Robert A. Schuller and GodTube.com founder Chris Wyatt — purchased the cable channel this past May. Baby boomers or not, the American Life Network (ALN) will now be devoted to family-values programming.

Continue reading this entry