As a child of immigrant parents, I grew up learning English from watching PBS, Sesame Street, specifically. But there were other favorites like 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, and of course, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. The logo, with its head looking like a P was seared into my developing brain.

So I’m incredibly saddened to hear that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded entity behind PBS and NPR, will cease operations on September 30, 2025, because of a recent bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Trump.

While PBS and NPR won’t disappear, it will be harder for those networks to stay afloat, now solely dependent on donations.

Lilly Smith, writing for Fast Company:

More than 70% of CPB’s annual federal appropriation goes directly to more than 1,500 local public media stations, according to a web page of its financials. This loss in funding could force local stations, especially in rural areas, to shut down, according to the CPB. Local member stations are independent and locally owned and operated, according to NPR. As a public-private partnership, local PBS stations get about 15% of their revenue from federal funding.

She reached out to Tom Geismar, who redesigned the PBS logo in 1984—the original was by Herb Lubalin and Ernie Smith in 1971. He had this perspective:

There is an ironic tie-in between the government decision to cut off all funding to public television and public radio, and what prompted the redesign of the PBS logo back in the early 1980s.

That was also a difficult time, financially, for the Public Broadcasting Service, and especially the stations in more remote regions of the country. Much of the public equated PBS with the major television networks CBS, NBC and ABC, and presumed that, like those major institutions, PBS was the parent of and significant funder for all the local public television stations throughout the country. But, in fact, the reality is somewhat the opposite. Although PBS local affiliates received a portion of funding from the federal government, it is the individual stations that have the responsibility to do public fund raising, and PBS, in a sense, works for them.

Because of this confusion, the PBS leadership felt that their existing logo (a famous design by by Herb Lubalin) needed to be more than just the classic 3-initials mark, something more evocative of a public-benefit system serving all people. Thus the “everyone” mark was born.

Geismar ends with, “And now, once again, with federal government funding stopped, it is the stations in the less populous regions who will suffer the most.”

This is gorgeous work from Collins in their rebrand for Muse Group, developers of music apps like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass. Paul Moore, writing in It’s Nice That:

One of the issues, [chief creative officer] Nick [Ace] argues, in the design industry is a fixation on branding tech as “software from the future”, relying on literal representations from the 1980s that have created dull and homogeneous visuals that shy away from the timelessness of creativity. “Instead of showcasing technical specs or outlandish interfaces, we centered the brand around the raw experience of musical creation, itself,” says Nick. “Rather than depicting the tools, we visualized the outcomes—the resonance, the harmony, the creative breakthrough that happens when technical barriers disappear.”

When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.

The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.

I knew instantly that the brand identity was paying homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of a galloping horse. It’s a logo for an AI video company.

The whole case study from Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell of Pentagram is great.

The British automaker Jaguar unveiled its rebrand last week, its first step at relaunching the brand as an all-EV carmaker. Much ink has been spilled about the effort already, primarily negative, regarding the toy-like logotype in design circles and the bizarre film in the general town square.

Interestingly, Brand New, the preeminent brand design website, hasn’t weighed in yet. It has decided to wait until after December 2, when Jaguar will unveil the first “physical manifestation of its Exuberant Modernism creative philosophy, in a Design Vision Concept” at Miami Art Week. (Update: Brand New has weighed in with a review of the rebrand. My commentary on it is below.)

There have been some contrarian views, too, decrying the outrage by brand experts. In Print Magazine, Saul Colt writes:

Designing since 1985

I’ve been a designer for as long as I can remember. I usually like to say that I started in the seventh grade, after being tenacious enough to badger my father into buying my first Macintosh computer and then spending hours noodling in MacPaint and MacDraw. Pixel by pixel, I painstakingly drew Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, for a book report cover. I observed the lines of the parabolic exterior of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known colloquially in San Francisco as “the washing machine,” and replicated them in MacDraw. Of course, that’s not design, but that was the start of my use of the computer to make visuals that communicate. Needless to say, I didn’t know what brand strategy even was, or why it’s important, but we’ll get there.

Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck (PDF) for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.

We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.