A DC comic rebranding

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A DC comic rebranding

January 20, 2012 by kieran

There has been a lot of talk recently over a rebranding of the comic book company DC comics.
DC (Detective Comics: the name of Batman’s first appearance) is one of the largest comic book publishers in the world, with characters that are recognised across the world and as such features some of the worlds most popular comic book heroes.

The logo that many relate to DC books was known as the ‘DC Bullet’ and was designed by one of the most famous Graphic Designers of recent history, Milton Glaser. This was replaced as recently as 2005 by a logo created as DC became part of an expanding Warner Bro’s project, to incorporate DC characters into other media such as film. The new logo was designed by Josh Beatman of Brainchild Studios. I always felt that the Spin logo ignored the heritage of the firm by trying to look digitalized where it would have made more sense to look into the history of the company and try to incorporate the traditional printing process.

Image showing the Bullet logo and the 2005 Spin logo

Now DC have under gone another rebranding.

This new branding puts the image in the mind of a hero taking the mask off themselves, revealing themselves.
The actual branding has a modern, digital friendly style, which allows the style to be portrayed across the whole of the DC Entertainment corporate identity

The new logo will be rolled out sometime in March

The design was created so that it could be interactive when portrayed in a digital format and Amit Desai, senior vice president of franchise management had this to say about the branding.

“We didn’t want a static logo, but a living identity that could capture the power of our characters and storytelling, What is special about DC content is the notion of a dual identity. When you think about our DC Comics superheroes, there’s a secret identity. When you think about Vertigo, it’s this notion of good vs. evil in many of the stories. And so, in addition to flexibility, the new logo communicates this idea of dual identity: There’s more than meets the eye. You have to take a closer look to understand the richness of our characters and stories.”

The use of touch elements was also shown on the rebranding, with a description saying how the user could pull back the D to reveal a character or the character’s logo. The other aspect of the design is its customization. The C of the logo can be fully customized to the colors of the character or story it’s promoting: silver and gray for the corporation, blue for DC Comics, or–as suggested by the graphic below–sparks for The Flash, green for Green Lantern, or a mist for Batman. All are unified by a common font–the serendipitously named Gotham Bold.

This image shows how the logo can be customized

Some of the main complaints from the public around this rebranding is its similarity to the branding of the TV station over here in the UK: Discover History.

This station branding was created in 2010 by PeterAndTom and used the same peeling image that DC have taken to literally ‘pull back the years’