The Logo & The Pig

The 'Letters' Logo
In the very early sketches, the huge cardboard letters were very visible in the background. They turn up in later sketches too, but they haven't been seen since FAH moved to their new office in January 2018.

These letters may remind you of the logo they used as their Soundcloud profile pic! The font used is probably IMPACT MT, a font from the Adobe family. You might recognise this font from the sketch titles in many of the YouTube thumbnails (FAH use Adobe Creative Cloud apps for their editing).

The Type Refresh
From the creator, a graphic designer in Galway called Bad Dog (aka Paul):

"Our favourite comedy outfit ever asked us to lend a hand with refreshing their logo mark. We did it with some customised type and that pig they already had!"

Typeface
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#:~:text=The%20distinction%20between%20font%20and,or%20related%20set%20of%20fonts. The distinction between font and typeface] is that a font designates a specific member of a type family, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or a related set of fonts.

This means that you probably wouldn't have much luck contacting Paul for a complete FAHlphabet set...

Take a look at this image of the Bad Dog Logo design on a t-shirt and spot the differences with the final version!

Colours
Paul's original design had no blue in it! Click through the slideshow to see the different versions.

The 'Letters Only' Logo
These letters look like they are set in the font IMPACT as well.

The 'Scribble' Logo
This logo was first used as the end card in It's Good to Talk (26/09/2012) and for the last time in How Not to Tell a Story (24/08/2017). This last sketch was shot and edited during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so Arms possibly didn't have the new end card logo - which they had already used three times - on file.

The old logo was still used as a watermark for a while after the Bad Dog logo was already in place as the end card.

The Bad Dog Logo
The new logo was first used in The Old Ways are the Best Ways in July 2017, so just before FAH left for their Edinburgh Fringe run of Oink, in a very basic version without 'shadows'. It's not yet another version from the designer, you can tell by the shape of the letters that the shadows ought to be there, and the logo does look a bit 'thin' without them.

Once in a while, the card changes colours. Even the first three instalments of the new logo had a different tone each time, perhaps as a sort of trial run. They settled on the dark blue one (the 3rd try).

During the (first) Swines Tour, between Dec 2019 and March 2020, they created a striking purple end card featuring a bigger pig with a floral, lace-like motif instead of the usual 'filled' one. The floral pig design was created for the first hoodie in their merch collection by LA based artist @risaroo77 on Instagram. The letters in the logo have lost their usual 'line shadow', but if you look closely you can see a feathered dark shadow instead. The text 'ON TOUR NOW!' is set in the free open-sourced font Bebas Neue by Dharma Type (also an open source font family) and the letters have the same shadow.

This end card was first used in the sketch Telling your Family you're Vegan (05/12/2019) and last in Squatters Ep1 - The New Housemate (12/03/2020). The last tour date that could go ahead before the lockdown took place only three days later, on 15 March (in Milton Keynes).

The end card shown below was created especially for their 'FAHrchive' uploads on Mondays to social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but not YouTube) since April 2020, at the start of lockdown. The chosen hues fit the purpose of these sketches: dusting off the old stuff to provide some much-needed entertainment during the lockdown and some sort of consolation for people who had tickets booked for cancelled (or postponed) gigs.

The font used for 'ARCHIVES' is Tavern S Regular by FontMesa. The built-in 'line shadows' match those in the existing logo.

End Card Animations
In October 2020, Arms decided he would like to have the FAH YouTube end cards reimagined as motion graphics. He hired me based on a motion graphics animation of the pig I did for the FAHnARTchallenge, and of course I immediately said ABSOLUTELY! It took a few weeks to find my footing, giving them different designs closely based on the existing end cards, only more textured and of course animated. Arms didn't want to dictate a specific look and gave me carte blanche, so as to not stifle my creativity, which I appreciated a lot. It gave me lots of freedom to experiment with textures.

My first pitch were two cards that each honoured the most recently used 'static' end cards. One is from Clickbait, which I thought had the nicest looking blue background, and the other was from their Swines tour where they used the floral pig logo. Here are the originals and my designs side-by-side:

The first animated end card he used, a very pleasant surprise, was for a Monday FAHrchive sketch on Facebook (16 November 2020). This was the first FAH sketch I ever saw, back when it had just premiered... coincidence? Yes, probably, but I mentioned it to Arms anyway. The old film effect was achieved using fractal noise, a vignette and various other tricks to create that dirty, distorted lens look from old TV sets. Another way would have been to use overlays (which you can download from template sites), but I wanted to try create the look from scratch.

Here's the GIF version of the card: .