Engineering Old-School Logos: Before Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign, How Were TV Logos Made?

It wasn’t as easy as using the pen tool back then, companies had to go to great lengths to achieve an original looking logo.

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when making a title sequence or logo could take weeks compared to one day when done digitally. Most logos today have 3D aspects and back then when put on a flat screen it was difficult for designers to incorporate 3D elements into their design since it was mostly done on paper.

Some companies went above and beyond to incorporate 3D elements in their logos to set them apart from the rest.

Time to dig this out again! The Eurovision ident used to be made of string (bottom pic 1954). #Eurovision2017 #ESC2017 pic.twitter.com/spaaRUCA9s

— Andrew Wiseman (@aswiseman) May 13, 2017

Take the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française for example, their RTF ident was actually made out of a physical tunnel of strings with the RTF marks floating in the middle. This company went to great lengths, which in turn produced an original ident that went beyond the 2D markings of the times and transformed them somewhat into the digital age by incorporating a vision of 3D markings.

HBO once had an over the top intro that panned through an entire city which they made by creating over 100 model buildings, and hundreds of handmade trees, cars and busses. Hours of work were put in all for a 40-second television intro.

This all seems crazy, right? The amount of work these companies put in just to create an original opening sequence or logo. That’s because it is crazy, especially if people were still doing it today.

Well, some manufacturers are still doing it the “old-way” when it comes to creating and sharing digital parts with their customers. When engineers need a drawing of a part, they actually have to call some manufacturers, who have to recreate the designs by manually drawing and sending them the sketch days later.

There is an easier way, and like these early logo designers, they saw the push for CAD and 3D models and so did CADENAS PARTsolutions with the eCATALOG platform that takes physical parts and turns them into living, interactive 3D models.