BY Armin

How Visceral is too Visceral?

Okay, so you are all tired and bored of these corporate mergers and boring wordmarks with simpleton icons that could be done with children’s chalks, right? Fine. Let’s take it to the opposite end of the spectrum, shall we? Visceral Games is the newly minted name for EA’s Electronic Arts Redwood Shores (EARS) studio that has been responsible for gory, action-packed games like Dead Space. Its tagline — which follows the same premise as EA’s “It’s in the Game” — is the more heart-wrenching “It’s in our blood.” The identity has been designed by Venice, California based Arnson Communications in collaboration with Bill Dawson.

“Action, intensity, excellence. It isn’t just in our DNA, it’s in our blood,” said Glen Schofield, VP and GM of Visceral Games. “For the past two years, we have adopted a new culture that prizes excellence above all else. Primal action is the beating heart of the studio and now our new name reflects that.”
— Press Release

The EA logo gone visceral.

To be perfectly honest, this is isn’t my kind of logo, I rarely wake up in the morning and think “Man, what I really want to do today is an X-rayed skull for my client.” Nor do I get excited by highly textured logos or grunge-painted typography. But, to hell with that, the logo works. It’s, well, visceral. And it’s uncomfortable and I don’t want to look at it for any period longer than what I already did. This is also a logo that will live on screen and on the web, so it makes sense to have a full blown image-based logo. Even when it’s in print, which will likely be on the video game package, it will be a full-blown 4-color print anyway. Faxing or embroidering is likely the least probable uses for this logo.

If I had any formal critiques as I would with a more “normal” logo I would say the VISCERAL typography could use some looser tracking and at the same time it could be somehow more integrated with the background, as it feels like it’s just placed on top, maybe getting rid of the blue stroke would help. The skull could be smaller as it sort of eclipses everything else. And perhaps a few other details here and there, but overall the logo achieves what it needs.

Logo animation.

To add to this story, we have some early sketches of the X-Ray idea to be able to see how things evolve from initial presentation to final execution.

Some of the early sketches for the X-Ray concept.

Some early early sketches of the design process.

\n\nOkay, so you are all tired and bored of these corporate mergers and boring wordmarks with simpleton icons that could be done with children's chalks, right? Fine. Let's take it to the opposite end of the spectrum, shall we? Visceral Games is the newly minted name for EA's Electronic Arts Redwood Shores (EARS) studio that has been responsible for gory, action-packed games like Dead Space. Its tagline — which follows the same premise as EA's \"It's in the Game\" — is the more heart-wrenching \"It's in our blood.\" The identity has been designed by Venice, California based Arnson Communications in collaboration with Bill Dawson.

Many thanks to our ADV @ UnderConsideration Partners