NGTV
We’ve been working on NETGEAR’s Interop booth animations for a few weeks now. One of the animations includes a logo I made a few years back to represent their faux tv news station, NGTV. While prepping the image for this year’s presence I noticed that I had used the wrong font when I originally created the logo.
When I made the logo we were on the show floor with about 12 hours before the show opened and someone remembered, “Hey, we’re going to need a logo for our web cast coverage!”, and I had all of 30 minutes to come up with something so they could integrate it into all the media so I don’t feel too bad that I got the font wrong.
Now that I have a few days before the show opens, however, I figured now would be a good time to update to match NETGEAR’s corporate image a little better.
NETGEAR’s interop booth and design is always very corporate and minimalistic to a large degree. I enjoy doing looks that are way out there with colors and concepts. For something fun like this I usually feel like you can break the mold a bit when designing the look for the logo, because something that’s supposed to be spoofy and fun should look fun.
With sparks flying and the logo drawing onto the screen with splines and all that jazz this little video stinger would certainly be fun and have a strong visual presence. However, NETGEAR’s Interop booth is pretty serious in it’s look and attitude so something like this would almost certainly be rejected. This logo also has to be used in a flat setting, like print and webpage, and this logo may not translate as well to those mediums.
Instead I sapped some of the colors from their Interop color palette which consisted pretty much of a large and grotesque gradient that swept from a steely blue to a near white blue and then onto a reddish purple. The blue presented the most possibilities for me so I used that as my base color for the background the logo would sit on.
Next I used a bold version of their font, which is Futura, and laid out a very simple logo with the “NG” being full sized and the “TV” being half sized and superscripted.
Not the most visually stunning logo ever, but it reads from a large distance, is easily printable and lets you know at a glance that it has something to do with broadcasting.
There is a video component for these logos to be used on the stage while interviews are given by live ‘anchors’. For the video portion I took the flat logo into my 3D program. I flipped the colors around a bit, making the main portion of the text blue as opposed to the white. The backdrop was given a bit of a gradient to set it apart from the logo a bit better.
With the addition of animated “radio signal” lines this becomes a very nice backdrop on the stage while the booth anchors are busy getting their scoop on.