Curious Pictures Logo

Curious Pictures Logo PNG

The logo of Curious Pictures, this animation studio, fully corresponds to its creative activity. Designers were able to combine completely different elements and get amazing results. They created an emblem for Curious Pictures that very accurately characterizes the brand.

Meaning and History

The long history of Curious Pictures has been accompanied by successful work on projects for broadcasting stations and television networks. But the animation studio did not get its current name immediately, but only in 1993. When it first appeared in the USA, it was known as Stowmar Enterprises. In 1981, employees of this organization founded Broadcast Arts and started creating computer graphics for MTV. Daring, humorous content splashed in the media, so many TV channels began to order commercials from the young company.

In 1993, the studio was named Curious Pictures, after which it expanded the office and filled it with modern equipment. This allowed her to hire a large team of directors to increase the number of projects she runs, including work on animated series and animated sketch shows. In this form, the company existed until 2014, until it was finally disbanded.

For more than 35 years of successful activity, Curious Pictures has changed its name several times, and with it, all the other elements of visual identity. The earliest logos have not survived, so their history goes back to 1982 when the company first started as Broadcast Arts. At the same time, the most famous are the word marks adopted after 1993 because, in them, the designers beat the external similarity of the question mark and the letter “P.”

What is Curious Pictures?

Curious Pictures is a defunct company specializing in making television animated products and video games. It appeared in 1978 under the name Stowmar Enterprises and was disbanded in 2014. It has owned two offices in recent years: in Los Angeles and New York.

1982 – 1987

The first Broadcast Arts logo was featured in one demo but was never used on television. The brand name occupied the top half, stylized as a neon sign. The word “Broadcast” was on the first line, and “Arts” was on the second, center-aligned line. The thin, sans-serif letters emitted a diffused blue light that faded into the surrounding darkness.

Under the inscription was a device with a rectangular body and two cylindrical protrusions along the edges. It stood on a narrow stand, probably on a table. To the right and left of the car, red sparks flew out, which was especially clearly visible in the animated version.

1987 – 1993

Introductory videos for Norman’s Corner and the unsold pilot for The Jackie Bison Show featured the new Broadcast Arts logo. It also contained the name of an American animation studio, but its style had changed. The inscription was on a black background with blurred white spots. In the word “BROADCAST,” all letters were capitalized, while the initial “B” differed in its size: it was higher than the rest of the glyphs, but the designers positioned it to protrude from the line, not from above, but from below.

The first eight letters were bold and blue. Against their background, the dark and thin last “T” stood out noticeably, which the creators of the logo placed inside a blue rectangle with a pink gradient. The “T” was formed by negative space and looked like a cutout in a square plate.

“BROADCAST” was pierced with a red stripe running from left to right. This line ended near the last letter, and immediately after it, the word “Arts” began. The designers made it look scribble because they used an illegible cursive font.

1993 – 2001

In 1993, a turning point came in the company’s history: it became known as Curious Pictures and updated its identity, entrusting the process to the Pentagram creative team led by Paula Scher. The developers created a minimalist wordmark and placed it on a clean white background. It was a black inscription consisting of lowercase letters with serifs. A red question mark was lowered down between her “curious” and “ictures” parts. It replaced “p” and even resembled this glyph in appearance.

1999 – 2014

The redesign carried out in 1999 was not too revolutionary. All that the authors of the Curious Pictures logo have changed is the color. As a result, the letters became light gray, and the red question mark took on a darker tint. This version was used until 2014, until the moment the company was disbanded.

Font and Colors

Pentagram designers creatively played with the visual resemblance of the letter “p” to the question mark and presented it in the logo of the animation studio. It turns out that “?” simultaneously serves as a substitute for “p” in the word “pictures” and performs its main syntactic function. In the first part of the inscription, it is asked: “curious?”. And then, the same question mark is used instead of “p” in the next half of the line.

The name Curious Pictures is written in a font as close as possible to Adobe Garamond Pro Regular from Adobe. This is an antiqua modeled after the elegant typeface of the Parisian engraver Claude Garamond and the italics of the French typographer Robert Granjon. The high contrast of the font (a noticeable difference in the thickness of the main and additional strokes) visually makes the logo dynamic.

If we talk about the latest version of the color scheme, it presents light gray and dark red. The original design, created by Pentagram in 1993, paired black lettering with a bright red question mark.

Curious Pictures color codes