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); it’s 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 only two years before Alan Goodman and I oversaw a the next change (designed by Tom Corey and Scott Nash) that lasted over 25 years.

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

New Network Look: Hairy, Fat

The first MTV bumper sticker.

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I came upon this photo on Flickr of the first MTV bumper sticker (part of a 1981 pre-launch promotional package that included a duffel bag, poster, buttons, and this) and a few trivia things about pricked by attention, completely aside from the fact that it was ‘the first.’

The first approved MTV logo design & colors

• The logo:

Like with everything at the beginning of a venture, everyone thinks they’re an expert. And when it came to the MTV logo, which broke almost every rule in the book, there were even more opinions as to what was wrong with it, and what could be changed to make it right.

In this case, there were many who believed you couldn’t read ‘Music Television’ on the logo design. And that would be tragic; people wouldn’t know what we were! So, they asked me to have the designers to “fix it.” Manhattan Design came up with a decent solution, which was only used this once; expand and extend ‘Music Television’ BIG, for those who couldn’t read.

• “On cable.”:

Almost no one in America knew what cable television was in 1981, and if they did, they thought it was synonymous with HBO (or “the Home Box” as many put it); fewer than 500,000 homes could get MTV when it launched. We had to tell people where to see this weird all music television thing. Was it on CBS? Channel 13? Where?

• “In stereo”:

“A television is a metal box which a crappy speaker in the side,” said the company’s first president.

Hard to believe, but no television sets could play programs in stereo in 1981. We were selling MTV to a generation that only wanted the quality of stereo (hell, we were that generation) and we knew it was a technological must.

We went really far to do this do. “In stereo” was one of the top “promises” we made on the air, producing hundreds of wacky promos to prove our point. Since no TV’s had two speakers, we created our own kit where you could link your stereo record player to your set (“You Can Make Your TV Stereo!!!” named by Alan Goodman), which was sold locally through the cable operator (another way for them to make some dough during a time that was no so assured in the cable biz).

And the music itself. The videos came to us with an believably bad, mono, audio track; it hadn’t mattered to the music companies up until then, the videos were mainly for play on international television stations, even more technically backwards than ours. Andy Setos, the head of the engineering team, went in an re-synced every single one of the clips from a stereo audio master, and, if necessary, took an LP (an LP!!) for the sync. Geez.

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Bumper sticker on my office wall, 1981