Broadcasted: Kabelkanal, 1992 – 1994
Logo, Branding
This logo was made in teamwork with the director of KabelEins at that time, P. T. Mc Loughlin, a colleagues from the print department (which name I forgott, sorry) and me in 1992. The logo symbolises simply a cross section of a cable bended in the corner of a screen. The colour scheme was just magenta and cyan and the whole on-air design looked quite new. I personally didn’t like the logo and felt, that this design was still in a state of a layout and not finished. The typo ‘Der Kabelkanal’ (The cable channel) is a designers nightmare. Because the secretary of this new TV station wrote all Word documents and proposals with Times, for some unexplainable reason, it should stay Times! By the time the channel went on air ‘Times’ obviously became a kind of entrenched habit. This causes also some technical broadcasting problems with old fashion PAL 720x576pixel wide and 72dpi resolution as the ‘Times’ typo was made for Word documents and not for low-resolution-TV-with-the-two-field-flicker-problem. The print typo font has got too thin serifs, which causes a flickering trouble, which would look like a technical failure. Now in 2000 that might be soon just past, because of High Definition Screens coming soon into all consumers living rooms. And another thing with old fashion TV was to broadcast 100% RGB and Whites. this lead in really problems with the picture – especially red and magenta – and could jump to the audio channel, causing an unpleasant noise. For the first logo our bosses and the cleaning maids choosed cyan and magenta – bingo! Great choice. At this time it was just atrociously apart from being broadcasted in a decent way as described earlier – you had to tint it for being broadcasted.
After all – who knows if we where very early trendsetters with 100% cyan and magenta? On websites it looks far more better.
Till today all broadcasters therefor have a bible called ‘Technical guidlines’ and everyone has still to stick to it. Therefore I hope I can find some pictures or clips with these PAL low resolution broadcast problems of sizzling, shreddered and noisy technical problems. We should collect them for the upcoming generations 
Please notice: the real logo hasn’t got 100% RGB Magenta or Cyan. Typo and logo were made good by me for the usability on-air. This logo and its magenta – cyan colour scheme last for 2 years. Despite of technical problems, this on-air design was absolutely unique and foolproof. The corporate design was used by so many people in the studios everyday and night, we never had any corporate image problems with it. So in the end, I was also a bit proud of it.
One outstanding peace of branding for a TV channel is of course its signation, a clip, showing the logo, claim and philosophy of the channel. For the channels quick launch in 1992 I had to produce a logo animation in a very short time. Normally the production of a TV channel animation is a quite honour to do and because it is so important, all the efforts and moneys goes there. Not with this channel launch. No money no time. But I still had to create a somewhat glamorous animation, which will be shown on-air around 24 times a day.
I never told anyone how I did it, especially the backgrounds of the signation. After all these years now I do admit – I filmed them myself at home under a table with a black curtain, using our crystal glasses and vases and tried to catch colourful light reflections on a VHS camera (!!). Than I processed this with on of Quantel’s wonder machines. The logo in 3D wasn’t that bad in the end, as I tried to use some of my reflections to blend its bright, harsh colours a bit down and to give it a bit of a natural look. The 3D animation was made at Kirch’s ‘Beta Technik’, 3D department, at that time they had very helpful guys there. The same people with whom I made Germany’s first virtual studio for the ProSieben News later. But that’s another story.
The version of the Kabelkanal Animation here which I was able to keep, is not anymore the original version. I think I treated it later to look better on my showreels.
But for a glimpse that should do:
Click to Watch!
Kabelkanal is called ‘kabeleins’ nowadays.