The peacock exists because RCA needed to prove colour was worth it.

In 1956, NBC’s parent RCA was selling colour television sets to a black-and-white nation. The peacock — first shown that May, an early version credited to John J. Graham — was pure marketing genius: a bird that literally is its colours, fanning them out so a viewer with a colour set saw the point in a single frame. “The following program is brought to you in living color” did the rest. The original bird had eleven feathers, far more literal and ornate than what we know now. It was a hardware advertisement disguised as an ident — and it worked because the symbol and the sales pitch were the same object.

Chermayeff & Geismar cut the peacock down to six feathers and made it timeless.

By the mid-1980s the ornate bird looked its age. For NBC’s 60th anniversary in 1986, Steff Geissbühler at Chermayeff & Geismar — the studio behind Chase, Mobil and NBC’s peers — redrew it: six stylised feathers, a cleaner body, a form that reads instantly at any size. It is a masterclass in subtraction. The 1986 peacock keeps everything the 1956 version meant — colour, pride, spectacle — while dropping everything that dated it. That mark is, essentially, the one still in use, which is the highest compliment you can pay a redesign: it stopped the clock.

The colours aren’t decoration — each one stood for a division.

The six feathers were chosen to represent NBC’s six divisions at the time, and the palette is usually mapped as yellow = news, orange = sports, red = entertainment, purple = stations, blue = network, green = productions. Whether or not viewers ever decode it, that logic gives the mark an internal discipline — six colours, six meanings, one bird facing right to signify moving forward. It’s the kind of story that makes a logo defensible in a boardroom and memorable in an article: the design isn’t arbitrary, it’s an org chart in plumage. Our homage keeps the six-colour fan and drops the bird entirely.

Before the peacock came back, NBC bought one of the most infamous logos in history.

The peacock’s return is sweeter because of what preceded it. From 1976 NBC ran a stark abstract “N” that reportedly cost around $750,000 to develop — only for Nebraska Educational Television to reveal a nearly identical “N” it had made for about $100. (The dispute settled with NBC providing broadcast equipment and funding a replacement design; the widely-repeated “NBC paid $750,000 to Nebraska” line muddles NBC’s own cost with the settlement.) The episode is a permanent cautionary tale about spending big on an abstract letter — and it’s precisely why NBC’s smartest branding move was to stop chasing modernism and bring the bird back. The wider lesson has aged well: audiences forgive a company almost anything faster than they forgive it throwing away a symbol they’d grown to love. The abstract “N” was competent modernism; the peacock was equity. NBC learned the difference the expensive way, and the six-feather bird has repaid the decision every day since.

The closing thought is simple, and it is the one NBC keeps proving: build on something real. An identity anchored in genuine substance — authentic heritage, a true point of view, a product worth believing in — will always outlast one built on styling alone. The symbol is the visible part, but its power comes from what stands behind it. Choose an idea with real substance, give it a distinctive and honest form, and commit to it fully, and you create a mark that means something — and, year after year, keeps meaning it.

The peacock does the talking; the type stays quiet.

NBC’s power is in the symbol, so its lettering is deliberately restrained — clean, humanist sans-serif wordmarks that let the bird carry the colour. Across eras NBC has leaned on straightforward gothic and humanist sans faces rather than a flashy custom display face. The specimen below stands in with a neutral geometric sans.

Six colours, one per division. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The commonly-cited feather palette runs yellow #FCB711, orange #F37021, red #CC004C, purple #6460AA, blue #0089D0, green #0DB14B. These are the widely-published community values rather than an official NBC spec sheet, so treat them as faithful reconstructions. Copy the working values below.

Keep the six-colour idea on hand — save the fan homage and the division palette to a board.