SciFi's new logo

Apparently, SciFi has been trying to rebrand itself. Now, I admit, I don’t watch SciFi at all (or TV, really), so I have no idea if this has been necessary. But I will say this; the logo doesn’t look particularly usable across platforms. Maybe they don’t care about letterheads or business cards, or maybe they’ve got a flattened, monochromatic version for that. I am kind of intrigued by the lights and shadows–it reminds me of those pictures of dawn from outer space, but I have a hard time seeing what they’ve presented here as actually usable. An effective logo is a relatively small graphical representation of the business entity. The company is supposed to be able to splash it everywhere as a sort of placeholder for its corporate info; the consumer should be able to look at it and understand, if only subconsciously, who the company is and what it does. I think the only way this logo works as a logo is as the big block letters alone–but then you miss a lot of the symbolism with the lights and shadows–but with those in, this is too big to use as a logo. Sorry, Syfy, your old logo was better.

As for the name, I’m reminded of a few years ago when Beaner’s, the local coffee chain, wanted to expand and discovered that its name is actually a racist term in California for Mexicans. (I don’t think anyone I talked to had ever heard of this before.) This is a good reason to change the name of a franchise. Since the logo has always been a big “B,” Beaner’s decided to play off that, and renamed itself “Biggby’s.”

There was a public outcry, of course. People don’t like change. We in Michigan were especially frustrated, as most of us had never even heard the term “Beaners” outside the context of coffee. Personally, though, my biggest objection wasn’t that they changed the name–it was that they changed it to something without meaning. The coffee shop hadn’t been founded by a guy named Biggby or anything. Why didn’t they just change it to Big B’s? Was that name already taken? Why use the homonym?

That’s the heart of my problem with Syfy. I understand that they’re moving away from solely broadcasting science fiction shows, but Syfy as a word either says the exact same thing as “Sci Fi” (i.e. “We do science fiction!”), or it says nothing at all. And to a lot of actual fans of the old Sci Fi, I think what the new name conveys is this: “We are a horrible parody of what we used to be.”