MTV changed their logo. So what? Fine. I admit I haven’t cared much about MTV in a long, long time, but I still feel a little funny. MTV was my Sesame Street. I was raised by Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Headbangers Ball, Kurt Loder, Pauly Shore—all of them.
I loved MTV.
So the logo feels like my cooler older sister just got a facelift. It’s still her, but she kind of looks off. Very simply, it’s a refreshing of the mark rather than a redesign. And a facelift is just a nip here and tuck there, right? They’ve dropped the “music television” descriptor, which is appropriate. The “M” has been cropped and widened, and the stroke on “TV” has been cleaned up, which is nice. Creative Review notes the updated logo allows MTV to house imagery within the widened “M” letterform:
The space in the new logo will be used more to push its programming and its endless procession of reality TV micro-celebrities than as a canvas for artists, and animators as it once was.
Sweetness! I was hoping they’d figure out how to incorporate Snookie in their logo.
Bobby over at Kitsune Noir has some good observations regarding the evolution of a 30-year-old brand:
MTV has become a household name, those three letters alone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call it Music Television before and I grew up in the 80’s. It’s the same as other major networks. You don’t get your news from the Cable News Network, you don’t tune into the Home Box Office to see True Blood and you don’t hate the National Broadcast Company for screwing over Conan. These three letter acronyms are culturally built-in at this point and after almost 30 years MTV deserves the same treatment.
Fair enough. I do think that many people will feel like this is absolute admission of a betrayal of the channel’s initial and core philosophy—playing music videos. Not that anyone has the patience to watch an entire music video these days.
Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and mulitplatform creative projects at the network, sums it up best:
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. 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.
In other news, I am officially old.
