"Peacocks tell more colorful stories." It was the internal mantra that guided NBC’s More Colorful rebrand, but to that could be added that they tell more daring ones, too. NBC pushed itself with the kind of conceptually-driven visual identity often reserved for cable.

Conceptualized by freelance consultant and former 180, Amsterdam partner/CD Larry Frey, and created by Culver City-based Capacity, the challenge was to find the brand’s voice while leveraging qualities owned by NBC, namely the six colors of the peacock.

To simply let the colors exist as a visual device, however, would be to fall back on the old stylistically-driven ethos. The team turned to color theory: connecting the brand with intuitive human responses to color. Their guide was a quote from painter Robert Henri: "Color is only beautiful when it means something."

Capacity also pushed the rebrand structurally. Gone was the traditional lockup, the usual dramatic shot of the network’s stars on a composited background, replaced by a bespoke "three-pop promo" end tag composed of three cuts, each with a different piece of show info. Differing from traditional rebrands further, Capacity designed a system of colorbursts. These eight-frame animated bars, consisting of six tone-on-tone colors, precede each promo and reveal its dominant color and thus mood, tone or character trait of the show. Designed to work subconsciously, they’re a departure from the very deliberate information that characterizes promos.

"We initially thought there was no way NBC was going to go for that," says Capacity CD Ellerey Gave. "It cycles through the six colors and ends on the last two frames of the same color, so that image is burned into your brain for a quick second. It’s this subconscious alert that there’s a promo coming and that it’s definitely an NBC branded thing.

www.capacity.tv