OK, hold on a second. I know you’re thinking this has absolutely nothing to do with the products at SolidSignal.com and on the face of it you’re right. But DC is a powerhouse. It’s not only part of the massive Time Warner empire (which has nothing to do with Time Warner Cable, and hasn’t for a long time) but it’s also turned into a massive multimedia enterprise in its own right. That, and let’s face it, a lot of us techies started out as comic book fans and I’m willing to bet that some of us still are.
DC’s logo, once a simple hand-drawn expression of the two letters of its name, had devolved into a 90’s-looking mess before taking a welcome step back from the edge in 2005 with the logo we’ve seen on recent movies. The new logo was clever, with a “page turn” look that evoked the comics experience but it was still too corporate to really feel like the comic book company that gave us so much entertainment in the 1960s and 1970s. The new logo calls back to the plain block lettering of the 1970s with a modern twist. One thing I do like about it is that if you’re a 10-year-old kid you can easily doodle this logo in your notebook, whereas the previous version was distinctly non-doodleable. Honestly that’s a pretty big selling point for a comics logo in my opinion. It has to be simple recognizable and easy to duplicate if you’re young and untalented.
The big subtext here is that they got rid of the word “Comics” which is acknowledgement that we’re not just talking about paper anymore. We’re talking about movies, video games, the whole franchise and just saying “DC” is enough since it encompasses all of that.
Now, all of that’s just my opinion. There’s a whole essay put together from the folks at Brand New exploring the new logo. It’s a couple of weeks old but I recently found it and thought I’d share it with you. Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
