Sunday Morning ID-making
by Paul Berkbigler, (4 comments)
As graphic design seemingly becomes ever more newsworthy for mainstream audiences, I continue to be amazed and delighted at the random places design discussions crop up. For instance, my wife and I were just watching CBS Sunday Morning yesterday A.M. and happened to catch none other than Mr. Steven Heller introducing a segment focusing on brand design / brand redesign, which then lead to a short feature on C&G Partners working on a 3-day design-a-thon to generate a new title ID for the Sunday Morning annual Money Issue.
It looks like CBS isn’t going to provide any on-line video of the segment at this point, so interested parties should contact CBS about a tape / copy of it or search out friends, neighbors, and anyone with TIVO that you’re associated with to see if you can actually see the segment. The little that you can peruse online are a brief article about the segment: and a page where you can see what C&G cooked up / vote on the audience “fave” from their work:.
Comments (4)
Bennett said:
While this might not be the most ideal situation for design to be presented to the viewing public it is still exposure. We talk about how we can elevate design in the eye of the general public, and this at least puts the thought in their head. I think I would have fallen off my chair if I looked up and saw Heller on my TV.
For the time period they had, I think the logos are pretty good. While a logo decision by public vote is a designers worst nightmare, it will be interesting to see what they pick.
Did anyone happen to TIVO this?
Posted on February 28, 2006
Kyle said:
I did not catch this one on Tivo.
Posted on March 1, 2006
Andrew Kopietz said:
Am i only who thinks in spite of the 3 day time limit, that C&G could’ve come up with something A LOT better and less… dated?
I don’t know if CBS wanted to maintain an old school look with their branding, but these logos are incredibly bad. Terrible. I’m really surprised that all the places i’ve seen this bit of new mentioned happen to be design blogs that pass up the chance to critique the aesthetic of the logo!
I’m not crazy am i?
Posted on March 3, 2006
pberkbigler said:
Andrew, you’re certainly not alone in that feeling, and I have to say that out of three fairly average entries from C&G to start with, the final “pick” of the three was even more average (they just ran the follow-up discussion / segment on this yesterday, and the public voted for “money” with the sun placed in the midst of it). There was some indication via prints and sketches shown in the midst of the segment that all three of these designs actually had motion sequences attached to them, so that might account for what seem to be three bland “final screen” designs, however I never saw any of those motion sequences actually played out in reference to the three possible designs so that may mean these were designed to be static and static they will remain…
It was actually my suspicion that the design merits of the entries would VERY likely be critiqued in the thread of these discussions, so I held off on any major commentary on them in my lead…
Now that the full cycle of the segment is finished, I’ll toss out the fact that by far the most interesting designs that were considered for these combo marks all showed up in the brief glimpses of the physical sketches that many of the designers offered up on camera. Everything that ended up coming out of the digital process on this project looked pretty expected and rather mundane by comparison.
This simply furthers the design undercurrent yearning to get back to the meat-and-potatoes of good conceptual sketch generation in our processes - too much time spent pushing pixels when we should be breaking lead instead. It seemed like the best energy generated on these ideas was totally ironed out once they took them into rapid production on their Macs - something I see happening both in my own work at points and especially in the work of my students…
While it warms my heart to see design discussed at least fairly seriously in media, and to see some of the true “backstage” view of it finally seeing the light of day it also simply makes me yearn further for backstage views of design luminaries in process (not to say that C&G probably doesn’t qualify as this - they simply didn’t seem to have an adequate chance to show off some real process and inspiration on this project)…
I’ll continue holding onto my DVD money and viewing time until we see something on par with Art:21 show up for the design world - Can Design:21 actually be that far behind when we’re seeing Hillman Curtis steadily produce the Designer Series?
Posted on March 6, 2006