Who are you?

Remember my Doctor Who themed Art Nouveau post from February? Well, recently the BBC decided to redesign the television show's logo.

One major characteristic of the show is that the character of the Doctor can regenerate every cell in his body if mortally wounded, resulting in a drastic (but not too entirely different) change of appearance and personality. This ability helps the Doctor to "escape death" in a way, although he has said that regenerating is almost like dying since the person he becomes as a result of the regeneration is often distinctly different from the previous Doctor.

Lost yet?  Here's how it is related to the visual identification systems we've been studying in chapter twenty of Meggs' History:  so far the Doctor has regenerated a total of eleven times, and each time the show has aired with a different Doctor, it has been introduced with the appearance of a revised logo in the opening credits. The latest logo is composed of the letters DW, which come together to take the shape of the Doctor's time traveling box, the TARDIS.


In 1960, Norman Ives stated that a symbol's function as a logo should:

convey with a clear statement or by suggestion, the activity it represents...The symbol, besides being memorable and legible, must be designed so that it can be used in many sizes and situations without losing its identity (Meggs 403-4).

This is particularly important in an extremely visually engaged culture, since symbols are practically competing against millions of other symbols for the dominance and permanence that William Goldman achieved with his pictographic CBS eye trademark from 1951.