Quotidien Identity

In May 2016, we were contacted by French production company Bangumi. They have been making a popular ‘infotainment’ show for the last five years called ‘Le Petit Journal’. It broadcasts on Canal+ every evening and attracts two million viewers. With the content ranging from serious news reports to mini comedy sketches, the show covers political, social and cultural news. The show was to move to a new broadcaster – TF1, and this meant a new name and a new brand. We were approached because it was felt that our ITV logo had the right mixture of gravitas and friendliness.

The new show was to be called Le Quotidien – The Daily. Our client felt that the new logo should be all about a Q. This would form a graphic to sit behind the presenters, and also a distinctive, minimal mark to brand the reporters’ microphones. We set about coming up with some interesting Qs.

‘Sliced Q’ was made up by slicing a globe into 3 sections. This represented dissecting a story and extracting the ‘juicy’ part. ‘L’hexagone’ referred to France’s shape and colloquial name. Q is pronounced ‘Ku’ in French, which sounds like ‘Cul’ – French for bum! Our client wanted us to explore this association, and ‘Derrière’ was our response. ‘7 Disks’ represented the 7 days of the week, with the emphasis on today. ‘Sunny Day’ was based on the same principle, with a reference to the sun – suggesting the cycle of a day. ‘Tongue’ was about irreverent, rock ‘n’ roll logo, all about going against the grain.

‘7 Disks’ was the clear winner for our clients Theo, Elodie and Yann (Barthés – the show’s presenter). They felt that this captured the ‘part news – part entertainment’ spirit of the show. We had included some of Matt’s sketches and they liked the multicoloured drawing (top right). The instinct was that a circular version of the logo would work best, enabling 3d globe representations of the mark in animation and on set.

We then had a thorough look at the drawing of the Q and the type for ‘Le Quotidien’. How heavy should the lines be? How should the lines terminate? We also looked at sets of colours. We wanted the extra long line – which symbolised ‘today’ – to be the show’s key colour, red. We tried some hand-drawn type.

We decided to make the logo as flexible as possible by choosing a set of colours which are legible on both black and white backgrounds. We also visualised the microphone with a white on red logo at this stage. There was a feeling that the show would be better described by more muscular typography. We looked at some new sans serif fonts and the use of upper case.

As usual, there was lots of communication with our clients throughout the process, in this case via Skype. We really enjoyed this project and it led to a new relationship with the show’s broadcaster – TF1. Building new relationships with our European neighbours; now there’s a lovely idea.