#Friends series logo tv
The Friendsaissance has made it so that it’s difficult to walk into a standard mall store and avoid T-shirts with the logo of the 25-year-old TV show. In short, the Friends logo looks cool now because it doesn’t look like the boring, focus-grouped fonts we typically see in our day to day lives. “As geometric, mechanical sans serifs grow in popularity within tech and corporate branding, interest in the handmade is steadily rising,” he says. He thinks that another reason that the Friends logo might be so popular at the moment is because it’s a total pendulum swing against the fonts typical in corporate branding in the 2010s.
#Friends series logo archive
“I can’t think of anything typographic that says ‘1994’ better than loosely spaced brush caps separated by primary colored dots,” says Stephen Coles, curator at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. No, the Friends logo is cool in the way that the Rolling Stones logo was cool in the mid-2000s, when it was on every single T-shirt at Macy’s. And not just cool in the way that Succession or The Walking Dead is cool, in that lots of people watch it and talk about it online, because wearing a shirt with the logo of either of those two shows would be lame. There are much better television show logos that exist ( Cheers! Stranger Things!) but the Friends logo’s resurgence is surely related to the fact that Friends is cool now. Handwriting analyst Elaine Charal said that the sans serif suggests that “the people on Friends are more direct and less conservative that the average person” and that the “doughy” look to parts of the letters nod to “the more sensual aspects of the show.”Īlexander Tochilovsky, typography expert and design curator of the Herb Lubalin Study Center, similarly says that the handwritten aesthetic makes the logo feel friendly, and that many comedy shows use a slant or an italic to indicate humor.īut that’s not why the Friends logo is everywhere. The handwritten, all-caps, italicized typography though, tells us about the show itself. We just loved it right away.” (I couldn’t find a graphic designer named Deborah Naysee anywhere on the internet Deborah, if you’re reading this, tell us what the dots mean!) Bright once told Comedy Central that they’re “just a design element” and that they were only used because “it made it stick out.” In fact, not a whole lot of consideration went into choosing the logo for the TV show that is almost synonymous with an entire decade: Bright said that the logo, designed by a woman named Deborah Naysee, was “the first and only pass at a logo. Theories on what the dots between each letter in F-R-I-E-N-D-S signify abound on the internet: some believe they mean “FRIENDS” is actually an acronym, (for what, no one knows), others think that each dot represents a character, or that because the color of the dots match the colors of the umbrellas the cast holds in the title sequence, that there is some kind of message to be found. Why? EtsyĬonsidering its iconic status, the Friends logo was designed surprisingly haphazardly.
Etsy, Amazon, and hundreds of anonymous screen-printing operations offer their own versions, creating a thriving - and unlicensed - black market of merch for one of the most popular TV shows of all time. Brides are giving T-shirts with “I Do Crew” in the uppercase, handwritten white letters separated by multicolored dots to their bridesmaids. High school graduates are ordering versions on hoodies that say “Seniors” in the Friends font. The Office is enjoying its own moment in the cultural spotlight, but Friends has something it doesn’t: a very memorable logo. It’s responsible for more than 4 percent of the streaming service’s total views, second only to The Office. A great deal of it, of course, is thanks to Netflix, where viewers who were too young to understand its jokes when the show first aired are rediscovering what made it so popular then. Precisely 25 years after its 1994 premiere, Friends is enjoying a renaissance. Earlier this summer, I’d seen versions a handful of times in other parts of New York City and in California too, and my editor reported seeing it as far away as Ireland, on a backpack at the Cliffs of Moher, all in the same unmistakable yet slightly unreadable kerning: the Friends font. A few days later, a European tourist in Midtown Manhattan. Last week, I saw it on a teenage girl’s T-shirt in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.