MLB’s ‘This Week in Baseball’ Gets New Logo, New Look

By John Rice
MLB Productions is unveiling a new logo and new graphic
treatment for “This Week in Baseball” with this Saturday’s show on Fox.
“‘This Week in Baseball’ has been in the air for over 30
years and you always have to try to reinvent yourself and keep the look and the
pacing of the show with what’s popular in television these days,” says David
Gavant, executive in charge of production for MLB Productions.

A new logo is at the center of the show’s new look.
“We wanted to get this logo really strong and build off of
that,” says TWIB producer Matt Anderton. “This logo stands on its own. You can
put it on a T-shirt, put it on a hat. It’s something worth looking at.”
MLB Flame Artist Charlie Tang, the creator of the new logo,
agrees.
“TWIB is an iconic brand,” Tang says. “Since [the show] has
been running for 32 years, it’s become a legendary thing in the baseball
television world.”
Tang, who also designed the previous TWIB graphics, says
that while he was pleased with the old look, “one thing I learned [was that] it
wasn’t designed as a logo on its own.
This time around, I thought the first thing I’ll do is design it against
a plain background. If it is strong
against a plain background then you know its going to fit in different
environments.”
Tang built the logo and animations for the show using Flame
as the primary compositor. Particle
Illusion software, from St. Louis-based WonderTouch, was instrumental in many
of the background animation treatments.
“It can run with After Effects,” Tang says. “It’s a pretty
flexible piece of software that helps you generate any kind of background –
elements that normally take a while.”
In addition to a new logo and animation, Tang also created
new sponsor graphics.
“There are features within the show that are sponsored,”
says producer Anderton. “In the last
couple of years, we felt like it broke up the show a bit.”
The new segment openings introduce both the topic and
sponsor with a dedicated look.
“Now I feel the graphics we’ve designed will make these
sponsored features feel more like they are part of the show,” Anderton says. “It’s
going to be seamless getting into the sponsored features while still showing
the sponsor logo and using their copy to get their message across. It’s not
going to feel as choppy.”
The previous design for the show has been used for the last three
years
“When we came out with that graphics package, it was really
something different and new,” Gavant says. “But everything is only relevant for
a six- or seven-month shelf life because it starts to get dated. This is an attempt to stay fresh and stay
ahead of the curve from a graphics perspective.”