New logo for ABC Comedy

ABC Comedy is a multiplatform entertainment brand of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Launching on December 4, it will span a TV channel (replacing ABC2), ABC iview (an online video-on-demand and catch-up TV service), ABC listen (a podcast and live radio app) and key social media platforms. Devoted to providing Australian audiences with an unrivalled comedy offering, ABC Comedy will be a mix of scripted and non-scripted, long- and short-form TV shows, and podcasts.

In my reviews, I normally compare an old logo with a new logo, but in this case, they represent different things, so I’ll just give my thoughts on the latter.

The ABC Comedy logo has a sort of Meccano appearance (for lack of a better description), where the letterforms look like pieces attached together. I quite like the effect, and can imagine the parts animating nicely, similarly to the line animations in this Google Project Fi promo.

Then there are those colours. Man, they are bright af. But hey, like a good comedy routine, it’s lively and daring. Evidently, it’s less readable on light backgrounds as I’ve displayed here, but, to be fair, we almost exclusively see it on dark backgrounds in applications.

Speaking of readability, the logo almost comes off as being read as COEMDY due to the positioning of the letters. Conceptually, however, the irregularity, to me, speaks to the randomness of comedy – you never know where it’s going to go.

There are also a number of variations of the logo, above. The middle one is used as a broadcast watermark (example below) while the bottom one is used in very small applications.

All in all, the logo is a perfectly fine symbol for the brand. I was initially iffy about the lurid colour palette, but in the end, the logo represents an industry of entertainers who don’t play it safe, so why should the logo?