Curious George is the name of a book series about the little monkey. The first book was written by Margaret Rey at the beginning of the 1940s and by today there have been several movies and tv-series created based on the original novel.
Curious George is a children’s book written and illustrated by American writers Margret and Hans Augusto Rey. The first Curious Monkey book was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. It recounts the adventures of the orphaned monkey and the Man in the Yellow Hat. George is a little monkey, brisk, curious, and terribly fidgety. Once jumping into a big yellow traveler’s hat, George finds himself on a steamer and sails out of Africa to a big, unfamiliar city.
The animation series Curious George began to appear in the 1970s, and a full-length cartoon about the touching relationship between the man in the hat and his tame monkey, a creature of a complex mental organization was released in 2006. Since then several more Curious George Movies have been released, telling the story of an inquisitive little monkey with an insatiable hunger for adventure.
What is Curious George?
Curious George is a famous media franchise, which originated from the series of books written by Margaret and Hans Augusto Rey at the end of the 1930s. Today, apart from the books, the franchise consists of a tv-series, and several films, released from the end of the 1970s.
The Curious a George visual identity is simple yet very warm and cozy. Its classic logotype, designed in 1940, is still in use nowadays, just in a bit modified and cleaned version.
The original logo, introduced in 1940, was composed of a red cursive script lettering, enclosed in a blue rounded frame with the monkey’s portrait on top. Written in a title case, the wordmark features a delicate black outline and shadow, which added strength and solidness to it.
The monkey was facing right and smiling, evoking a playful and friendly feeling and representing the main hero of the novel, George, and his adventurous spirit.
This original logo is still in use today along with the new one, simplified version, which consists of a single wordmark.
In 2004 the franchise got a new logo — bright and tender, it contained a drawing of the little monkey sitting on the shoulder of a gentleman in an elegant suit, and smiling. The image was enclosed into a horizontally oriented oval, which was set on a solid yellow background and accompanied by a bold red lettering above and below it. This version of the logo was only active for a year.
It is a brighter and bolder version of the first logo, where the letter lines are sleeker and the black shadow is thicker and more visible.
The red, black and white color palette makes the logo look bright and warm, evoking a sense of energy, motion and making it interesting to every reader to get to know the main character of the book and his adventures and openings.
The elegant yet stable and bold lettering from the primary Curious George badge is set in a custom heavy cursive font with smooth contours of the title case characters and distinctive cuts of the lines. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Ecsetiras Regular, or Brush ATF BlackC but with significant modifications of the characters’ contours and lines of the letters.
As for the color palette of Curious George’s visual identity, it is based on an intense shade of red, accompanied by black, used for the outline and a thin shadow of the characters. The most powerful color combination ever existed, red and black here stands for energy and passion, representing the determination of the franchise and its willingness to bring joy to its audience.