KFDF Station Launch
It’s not every day that a wet-behind-the-ears, 23-year-old promo producer gets to create the entire image branding campaign for a whole new station. UPN 32 in Fort Smith didn’t even start out as a UPN affiliate, though it was always intended to be one at some point. UPN 32 started out as “Sports 32,” and in lieu of network programming of any kind, as many local, regional and national syndicated sporting events as possible were crammed into the schedule. Not even half a year passed before “Sports 32″ became UPN 32, and right from the beginning I was stockpiling graphic elements for such an eventuality. Indeed, the original KFDF logo, a multi-colored hexagon, was intended to play well alongside UPN’s geometric logo. The original logo was created in the Targa TIPS+ paint program, while the first UPN 32 legal IDs incorporated animated elements from Lightwave 4.0, composited with the Video Toaster 4000.
Sometimes it seemed as though management couldn’t decide which logo they liked. Having completed a year on the air with the original, home-made hexagon logo, an update was requested, and the initial result was a slightly different hexagon - essentially an updating of the original, rendered in Lightwave 4.0 on the Toaster with a metallic texture to match UPN’s new metallic version of their own logo. That logo survived through fall 1996, at which point it was superceded by a logo outsourced from a local ad agency. At various times, all three logos could still be seen on the air inside of the same commercial break due to the tremendous time pressure on rolling out new promos vs. updating the existing ones - not a very smooth rollout. (And I hate to sound like I’m a bunch of sour grapes, but the agency-produced logo even put the UPN shapes in the wrong order.)
