MTV: Music Television, The Logo

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The “first MTV logo,
designed by Manhattan Design

The mutating MTV logo, 1981,
designed by Manhattan Design

I was the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television, joining the parent company (then called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company) May 5, 1980. My boss, Bob Pittman asked me to oversee all of the original production and programming for the fledging cable television channel (who had even heard of cable TV as anything other than a service for rural audiences?) though I’d never seen a television camera.

The first job? Establish a vocabulary, “voice,” and look for the thing. The first move? Hire my oldest and best friends, Alan Goodman and Frank Olinsky.

In my MTV office, 1981.                 Photo by Alan Goodman

As far as I can remember, the article below was the first written on the MTV logo (designed by Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky & Patti Rogoff), from June 1982, about 10 months after the network launched.  My favorite part is the illustration of the what was essentially the “first” MTV logo (illustrated above). Notice the section in the article on Nickelodeon was about their redesign, but that was two years before Alan Goodman and I oversaw a the subsequent change (designed by Tom Corey and Scott Nash) that’s lasted over 25 years.

(You can read more about my adventures with MTV here or at The Fred/Alan Archive.

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