A few examples from the extensive brand manual for the 1980s logo, courtesy Steff Geissbuhler.

The peacock has been the canvas for a stunning range of reinterpretations: a rainbow of M&Ms, a balloon version created by Jerry Seinfeld, a bunch of feet in colored socks, a TV dinner with feather-shaped compartments filled with colored jellybeans, and more. The peacock also once provided a humorous introduction for the network’s comedy shows, as in a version where the bird sneezed so hard that he blew off his tail feathers.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR NBC?

The 1980s version of the NBC logo is still in use. Of late, its tail has seen additional treatments—gradients, glass-like transparency effects—to render it dimensional for HDTV. Bierut says, “The peacock started out flat, which made sense, but now it’s gotten all round and shiny. Maybe there’s a big network look that these things need to have, that has to do with shininess, and with demonstrating production values at all cost. Flat looks cheap, but it takes a little bit of extra effort and presumably money to do highlights and modeling to render each feather of the peacock. It’s sort of like the equivalent of a rotating, flashing siren on top of a police car: shiny and loud, red and pulsating.”

Despite these recent design affronts, the bird is still with us because it works on many levels: conceptual, visual, and perhaps most important, emotional. But does that guarantee its continued health? “It’s really hard to wean people away from a symbol they feel affection toward,” says Bierut. “If you make it go away, people take it personally, as if there’s this violation of trust, as if something they love has literally been killed. So I’d keep the peacock and let it serve as a starting point, a true north to build out a whole confident design language. There’s no reason why the peacock couldn’t run the gamut from something very flat, concise, and telegraphic that would reproduce well small, all the way up to something full color and expressive.”

Another approach would be to introduce different personalities and renderings of the peacock related to different kinds of programming, showing a variety of voices through the same familiar character. Peters says, “I’d give it some room to speak more directly to specific audiences. And that’s so important today, that you’re not a generalist, that you understand the tribes and communities that seek, create, and engage with content.” Geissbuhler agrees. “I would look at where the company is heading. It’s not just straight TV anymore; this tree has grown in all directions,” he says. “There’s MSNBC, local stations, NBC Sports, all the different divisions. The nature of the broadcast beast has changed, but I would still keep the bird a while longer—it can exist for a long time if you use it intelligently.”

When radio was the only game in town, one simple logo was enough to represent NBC’s place in the broadcast world. Today’s widespread market practically demands a logo with built-in flexibility. Tracing the NBC logo’s path since 1926, from radio to network television to multiple media markets, is a look at a visual identity that reflects the nature of its industry’s underlying technology, provides an intimate look at our entire culture along with snapshots of prevailing design trends and thinking along the way, and gives us an idea of where we’re headed next. The bird abides.