NBC News Now streamer ‘tinkers’ with its logo font

NBC News Now, NBC’s free news streaming service, has switched its logo to the proprietary font that’s slowly spreading to all realms of the peacock network. 

The streamer officially switched over to an NBC Tinker version of the logo on Nov. 20, 2023.

NBCNews.com, apps update to new logo along with streamer

Tinker is the proprietary typeface, based on Sweet Sans, that NBC uses in its primary logo as well as in the looks for its news division logo, entertainment promos and the “NBC Nightly News” logo.

In late November 2022, NBC began rolling out a redrawn peacock icon and updated logotype with a bolder version of Tinker. NBC had used a lighter and more tightly-spaced version of Tinker going back to 2013 along with its original peacock logo.

NBC News Now also dropped the underline stroke from under the logo while adding a trailing underscore to the design.

A blinking underscore at the tail end of text is a hallmark of the primary NBC News Now graphics package and was used in the old version of opens in addition to the underline. 

Across NBC News Now, opens and other fullscreen graphics have been updated with the new logo, but remain the same otherwise. In most cases, neither the oversized text used in the background of animations nor the microtext accents changed. 

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The logo was also updated on on-set video wall graphics, which also still incorporate other fonts in select elements.

The network also updated its bug in the lower left of the screen, though the animation remains largely the same — including the “spinning” wheel animation, feathers that blink subtly from right to left and use of the underscore as a sort of cursor. 

The word “Now” does become underlined in the bug briefly, but, unlike the old version, it does not remain on screen. 

Both the bug and most uses of the logo in animated graphics now shed the white outline around the peacock, which follows a similar strategy used elsewhere.

NBC News Now did not redesign its lower third inserts, which use the open-source Roboto, and were last updated about two years ago.

Essentially, it’s more accurate to say that NBC News Now has switched to a new logo, as opposed to saying the graphics were redesigned. 

NBC News Now previously used the network’s other proprietary font, Wordmark, in its logo. That font is still used in the MSNBC logo.

Kate Snow, left, and Zinhle Essamuah anchor Nov. 20, 2023’s edition of ‘NBC News Daily’ with the updated ‘NBC News’ logotype visible on both the left and right side of the studio.

In addition, both hours of “NBC News Daily,” one which airs only on Now, with the other carried on the NBC network, were updated with a Tinker version of the NBC News logotype. 

The font used to spell out “Daily” and Founders Grotesk, which is used prominently through this show’s look remains the same. “Daily” shares an insert graphics look with NBC News Now. 

Despite its uses on NBC News Now and the network’s flagship evening newscast, “NBC Nightly News,” Tinker has not spread to the news division’s other prominent shows “Today” or “Meet the Press.” It also hasn’t spread to MSNBC.

CBS has managed to get both “CBS Mornings” and “CBS Evening News” to migrate to TT Norms (“CBS Sunday Morning” also uses it, but Sunday morning public affairs show “Face the Nation” does not). 

CBS also uses Norms for all of its owned stations as well as its national and regional streaming news services.

ABC News is more inconsistent, with all of its major news programs, “ABC World News Tonight,” “Good Morning America” and “This Week” as well as its streamer ABC News Live, using different fonts in logos. ABC does lean heavily on Proxima, however, across many of its offerings. 

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