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Best/Worst/Most Interesting TV Station Logos

This is an interesting one from 1988.
 

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The KTVU and KRON logos in the San Francisco Bay Area have been enduring classics.

A favorite from earlier on, as you'll be able to tell from the call letters, is from St. Louis' KMOX-TV. The static image doesn't do it justice; the ID was actually a short film where a strip was folded to make the "4":

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Later versions took the different colors out.

(St. Louis local television in the 1970s was really competitive; CBS used KMOX-TV as its laboratory for new technology and KSD-TV and even KTVI had to run hard to keep up. That made everyone better.)

A logo that I can't find online was from WHO-TV in Des Moines in the late 1960s, also an animated film. The film zoomed in on one of the eyes of a stylized owl. When the eye was in close-up, showing the WHO-TV call letters, the eyelid went down. When the eyelid opened, the number "13" appeared, which was WHO-TV's channel number.
There's an old movie called Colluses: The Forbin Project that shows a late 60s, early 70s KRON 4 logo on a van. I took a screen shot from the movie of the truck below.
 

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I really dislike the logo of KIII-TV, Corpus Christi, TX (in particular, the 3 logo). It looks dated and unfriendly to me. Curious what others think.

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It's surprising Tegna has left this logo unchanged, but under McKinnon KIII was so dominant it made sense. Many of the visual trappings were shared in their station group: KUSI had a very similarly designed logo in the 1980s.

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My avatar is another Texas logo oddity, one that was completely unrepresented until I found it. (Coloring is speculative on my part after I retraced it) It's the short-lived KZLN 60 Harlingen, Texas, the public TV station that started at the wrong time in the wrong place and only operated under that call sign for 14 months.
 
I've been fond of the WPIX-TV channel 11 logo from the Eighties, "11 Alive", using the shape of the World Trade Center twin towers. (The earlier "11 Alive" logo was, IMO, just meh.) The logo has a poignancy to it in the aftermath of the 9/11/2001 attack that took them down.
 

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I really dislike the logo of KIII-TV, Corpus Christi, TX (in particular, the 3 logo). It looks dated and unfriendly to me. Curious what others think.

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It’s horrid. I’ve always found it ugly. The lower case calls add insult to it.

The Corpus stations all need a refresh. KZTV’s looks like someone made that in about 30 seconds in PowerPoint.
 
I thought this could be interesting. I'm starting off with the classic stylized 5 from WCVB in Boston.
It reminds me of the recent logo used by Mexico's Televisa-Univision Channel 5.

800px-Canal_5_Mexico_logo_2014.svg.png
 
I've been fond of the WPIX-TV channel 11 logo from the Eighties, "11 Alive", using the shape of the World Trade Center twin towers. (The earlier "11 Alive" logo was, IMO, just meh.) The logo has a poignancy to it in the aftermath of the 9/11/2001 attack that took them down.

RTL2 in Germany used a very similar design, but with the proportions slightly modified to make the "II" look more like an on/off button. Here it is in action (but ignore the first, older ID with a different logo):

 
RTL2 in Germany used a very similar design, but with the proportions slightly modified to make the "II" look more like an on/off button. Here it is in action (but ignore the first, older ID with a different logo):

Similar, yes, but to my eye RTL's version resembles a pair of silver bullion bars. The PIX 11 logo was more 3-D, so it looked like the twin towers, especially to locals familiar with their iconic shape.
 

KPLR-TV St. Louis at one point even used the Circle 11 Logo from WPIX-TV. But in KPLR-TV’s case they made the circle 11 under Koplar’s ownership mainly to promote their then Analog Channel on 11 in the 1980’s and 1990’s

As of 2025 WPIX-TV and KPLR-TV are managed by Nexstar.
 
Here’s some interesting logos I’ve seen over the years myself as well, from KCNC, KASA, and KRQE.
 

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Does anyone know of any station on ch. 11 that used "e11even" with the two L's stylized as ones? A quick search only turned up some night club in Miami...
 
The Group W font was NOT "Anklepants."

That's a knockoff free font that imitated (badly, in some cases) the actual Group W font, which dates to the 1960s and did NOT have a name.
I have a confession to make...

Back around 1997, Ray Larabie, the Canadian typographer who created "Anklepants" did so after I suggested that the Group W logotype would make a neat font seeing that he had created fonts based on band and company logotypes. I sent some scans of various Group W station logos and he had it done within a few hours! Not the name I would have chosen but I just loved that it existed at all.

Somebody else created a font called "Westinghouse" that addresses some of the deficiencies of Anklepants.
 


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