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.

Doctor Who in Le Style Mucha

Alphonse Mucha's Dance

Alphonse Mucha disagreed with the phrase Art Nouveau. Why? He believed that art is eternal, and therefore cannot be called nouveau, which means new in French (Meggs). 

For those of you who don't know, Doctor Who is a British TV show produced by the BBC. It involves an eccentric man referred to as the Doctor who travels through time and space in a machine called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), which is the blue police box you see behind Amy Pond in the image below. The show ran from 1963-1996 and has recently been revived and modernized, which aired its first contemporary episode in 2005.

Bill Mudron's
Amy Pond by way of
Alphonse Mucha

Although he did not actively associate himself with the Art Nouveau movement, Mucha became one of the most widely influential artists of the period. Many still use the expression le style Mucha interchangeably when describing the movement's most prominent visual characteristics, specifically in reference to the Art Nouveau period in France. Mucha gained recognition when his poster depicting Sarah Bernhardt as Gismonda appeared in Paris. It is around this time that Alphonse Mucha joined a group called the Salon des Cent, gaining an interest in symbolism; perhaps this contributed to Mucha's instantly recognizable style?

P.S. Did you know that Google celebrated Alphonse Mucha's 150th birthday on July 24, 2010 with a Doodle-of-the-Day?