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Archived Weekly Features
This View by Nancy LeMay |
 Nancy
LeMay is a five-time Emmy winning broadcast designer who has
worked both in New York and LA, in network and local. She is
a teacher and a painter as well. You can reach her through her
website, www.Nancylemay.com
and by email at NancyLeMayCo@aol.com |
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 APTRA
Academy Logo:
The New Look
We live in a sea of logos - some poor ones and an amazingly
large number of good ones. Most people know what a logo is,
and it’s one of the few areas of graphic design that non-designers
have opinions about.
This is one of the reasons why designing them is challenging
and fun; it’s an esoteric exercise, full of subtleties, but
people respond to logos. So the third opportunity to design
the logo for the APTRA Academy (Hal has details about this great
program elsewhere on the site) was a welcome assignment.
The Academy focuses, in a two-day intensive ‘boot camp,’ on
anchoring, writing and reporting the news on TV. How to symbolize
these professions? Anchoring came first...how to show this?
Well, I reasoned, the anchor sees and is seen; an icon of the
human eye works here. Writing: easy. A page with the written
word on it. Reporting...a bit tougher. Reporting is about speaking
and being spoken to; so I found a classic ‘dialogue balloon’
to symbolize the exchange of words.
But now I had four spaces and just three symbols: having decided
to take a flat, symmetrical approach to the design, there was
no going back from the need for four graphic elements. This
solved itself, because the one experience everyone has at the
Academy, no matter what they focus their study on, is discovery.
Students learn the rigors of working under deadline, the rush
of standing in front of a mic and ‘going live.’ They discover
a voice they didn’t know they had, or an obstacle to their development
they need to address. Everyone comes away from the weekend having
had the chance to learn real-world and real-time skills from
working pros in TV news.
And so I filled in the empty space with the great symbol of
surprise and discovery: the exclamation point tells the rest
of the story of APTRA Academy. |
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