I was the Art Director of RightThisMinute, a nationally-syndicated TV show, from 2012-2018. In 2014, for the show’s third season, I had the opportunity to redesign the logo. We wanted something that said “video”, could be playful, and infinitely modified to fit any situation. It primarily had to work on television and the internet but should still work in print when reduced to one color. The play button became the show’s mascot, and we often separated it from the word mark and let it have a life of its own. It functioned as a simplified social media icon and a short hand signifier for the whole brand. The wordmark had previously represented the name of the company all on one line: RightThisMinute. This sometimes created awkward layouts. Stacking the words allowed the format to change to something more square and made it more comfortable for most social media platforms.

We settled on a solution in 2014, but after living with it for a year we realized that it had trouble reading over busy video backgrounds. The inclusion of a new tag line also necessitated a new lock up. So in 2015, at the start of the show’s fourth season, we introduced the circle container, which solved both of those problems. The whole logo was now more of a contained object, something which benefitted our animations, as you will see below.

We has also developed a secondary logo that reflected the way we had begun to casually refer to the show, “RTM”.

Because of the variety of viral videos featured every day, the show uses a lot of interstitial transition animations between stories to reset the tone of the episode. Every transition is also an opportunity to reinforce the brand in entertaining and surprising ways. So I envisioned the logo as something similar to MTV’s identifiers in the 1980’s. The logo had to be simple and iconic enough to change color or be put into a random scene and still maintain its essence. The images below are stills from animations that I created using the various elements of the RightThisMinute logo. A compilation of these animations can be found here.