Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

NBC, Netflix and Network Branding

·40 min·2 clips

Netflix’s ta-dum came from a wedding ring, a slowed-down anvil, and a reverse guitar phrase.

The bar TVs do the setup. Elliot and Todd use them as the excuse to wander from sports-and-movies chatter into the visual identities of NBC and Netflix. Drinks come along for the ride, because of course they do. The NBC stretch keeps circling back to the peacock as a brand asset tied to color television and audience recognition. Peter H. Kleigman's research gets a nod, mostly because it makes the bird-color-NBC connection feel less like design lore and more like something people already understood. Then the hosts settle into the mid-80s: Miami Vice, MTV, and the visual mood that makes the redesigned peacock feel right at home. Shirmayev and Geismar enter the story, and Steph Geisbuehler's version becomes the current peacock, cleaner and steadier than the earlier ones. The six feathers carry the system. Yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green each map to a different NBC division, including news and sports. The head faces right, a tiny choice the hosts read as forward motion because of left-to-right reading. The body gets sleeker too, with one plume flipped downward into the central form. Then comes the strange lag: finished in 1980, launched on May 12, 1986, for the network's 60th anniversary. The ending returns to the bar, where a tadum joke turns sonic branding into a drink-order cue and the empty glasses quietly win the argument.

As heard by us

Branding history that makes a peacock, a chime, and a punchline feel like the same problem.

Two Designers Walk Into a Bar makes NBC and Netflix feel like a neat lesson in how branding can survive a shift in technology. It moves cleanly from the network-versus-content-provider setup into NBC's Peacock history, then into the 1980 update that brought six feathers, bold…

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Why you'd press play

You want branding history with jokes, not a lecture.

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