Curious Pictures Logo PNG
Curious Pictures’ logo, this animation studio, fully reflects its creative work. Designers combined completely different elements to achieve 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 adopt its current name until 1993. When it first appeared in the USA, it was known as Stowmar Enterprises. In 1981, employees founded Broadcast Arts and began creating computer graphics for MTV. Daring, humorous content splashed across the media, prompting so many TV channels to order commercials from the young company.
In 1993, the studio was named Curious Pictures, after which it expanded the office and installed modern equipment. This allowed it to hire a large team of directors to increase the number of projects it ran, including animated series and sketch shows. In this form, the company existed until 2014, when it was finally disbanded.
Over more than 35 years of successful activity, Curious Pictures has changed its name several times, and with it, all other elements of its visual identity. The earliest logos have not survived, so the company’s history dates back to 1982, when it began as Broadcast Arts. At the same time, the most famous wordmarks were adopted after 1993 because they exploit the visual similarity between the question mark and the letter “P.”
What is Curious Pictures?
Curious Pictures was a defunct company specializing in animated television productions and video games. It was founded in 1978 as Stowmar Enterprises and disbanded in 2014. In recent years, it owned two offices: one in Los Angeles and one in 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” on the second, center-aligned. The thin, sans-serif letters emitted a diffused blue light that faded into the surrounding darkness.
Under the inscription sat a device with a rectangular body and two cylindrical protrusions at its edges. It stood on a narrow stand, probably on a table. Red sparks flew to the right and left of the car, especially 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, but the initial “B” differed in size: it was taller than the rest of the glyphs, and the designers positioned it to protrude from the line, not from above, but from below.
The first eight letters were bold and blue. Against the background, the dark, thin last “T” stood out, set inside a blue rectangle with a pink gradient. The “T” was formed by negative space, 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 the word “Arts” began immediately after. The designers made it look scribbled by using an illegible cursive font.
1993 – 2001
In 1993, the company’s history took a turn: it was renamed Curious Pictures. It updated its identity, entrusting the process to the Pentagram creative team led by Paula Scher. The developers created a minimalist wordmark on a clean white background. It was a black, lowercase, serif inscription. A red question mark was lowered down between her “curious” and “ictures” parts. It replaced “p” and even resembled this glyph.
1999 – 2014
The 1999 redesign was not very revolutionary. The Curious Pictures logo’s designers changed only 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, when the company was disbanded.
Font and Colors
Pentagram designers creatively played with the visual resemblance between the letter “p” and the question mark, incorporating it into the animation studio’s logo. The “?” simultaneously substitutes for “p” in the word “pictures” and serves its main syntactic function. The first part of the inscription asks: “Curious?” Then, the same question mark replaces “p” in the next half of the line.
The name “Curious Pictures” is set in a font as close as possible to Adobe Garamond Pro Regular. 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 font’s high contrast (a noticeable difference between thick and thin strokes) makes the logo feel dynamic.
The latest color scheme uses light gray and dark red. The original design, created by Pentagram in 1993, paired black lettering with a bright red question mark.