Check out this new ad from MSNBC, featured in Newsweek. I think the ad communicates very well. And yet I also wonder if MSNBC is going in the wrong direction by positioning itself as "all kinds of news for all kinds of people." As if it wasn't bad enough that they've line-extended not just one brand (MSN) but two (NBC)! Think of Fox News. What one word do you think of? Conservative. What about CNN? I think of Cable News. What about MSNBC? I'm not sure what others would think. I think Olberman or Peacock or NBC. The bottom line is I think MSNBC would be better off picking one color of the spectrum rather than all of them. Although the ad is pretty. ;D On a side note, I'm a sucker for colorful information design and branding:

So it just came across my attention that the Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball) changed their logo and official colors. I probably should have known months ago when the announced it, but I could care less about the sports teams here in AZ and baseball in particular is uber boring IMHO. Anyway, I got a glimpse of the new duds while browsing the Arizona Republic website: Now, if you ask me, those new colors look butt ugly. Don't get me wrong, red is my favorite color. But compared to the purple and teal they had last season (and 10 or 11 seasons before that), this new color scheme is boring and unoriginal. Old Diamondbacks logo Besides the sad demise of the purple and teal, this story got me thinking about another thing: aren't all the sports teams in a city supposed to wear the same colors? Isn't that what makes the support for all the teams stronger? In Phoenix, apparently they don't think so. It looks like they're getting closer to all going black and red. That's nice, but, how unoriginal! Arizona is too pretty and too colorful for such a bland, me-too color scheme. Why not a purple and teal, or purple and orange (like the Suns) or even a maroon and gold (like ASU)? And why not stick with the same color scheme for all teams? I grew up in Pittsburgh where it was black and gold everywhere, all the time. You can go to a Steeler game and see someone with a Penguins jersey on. Or you can go to a Pirates game and see a lot of people with Steelers jerseys on. It's interchagable. It's Pittsburgh. It's part of the city's brand itself. But here we have the Phoenix Suns and Coyotes, and the Arizona Cardinals and Diamondbacks. They can't even get the choice of city or state consistent! What do I care, I don't care for teams other than the black and gold ones anyway.

So I was gathering news for my weekly news trivia game and saw MSNBC's new logo, and apparently their new website "look." Here are their old logos: The one with "MSNBC" all in a line (the last one) has always made me cringe. Look how wide that N is! And the thickness of the S totally doesnt match visually with the other letters. The M is much too narrow. I think they just took the letters from the first logo and just put them in a line without any care for trying a new (and better designed) typeface. BUT... so here's the new logo: Which "usual trend" did they follow in this redesign? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Give up? The letters are all lowercase. A lot of companies fall for this one. It looks so much better, to be sure, but it comes off as "weak." This might be ok for a children's-themed company perhaps, but the third-largest cable news channel in the U.S.? Some other companies that have gone lowercase: I'm sure there are a zillion more than I can't think of off the top of my head.