CBC Logo History: Burton Kramer's 1974 Gem and Today's Red C

Maps, thunderbolts and a butterfly before the gem

The public broadcaster was established on November 2, 1936, and for its first few years it had no real symbol. The first one arrived in 1940. It was designed by Hortense Binette, a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, and it showed a map of Canada crossed by a thunderbolt, the old shorthand for broadcasting.

The map in that first logo is a small time capsule. From 1940 to 1949 it included Newfoundland, which was not yet a province. In 1958 a new logo by Jean-Paul Boileau, a scale-model artist, put the words CBC and Radio-Canada over the map, with the French name on top in the French version.

Then came a sharp turn. In 1966 Hubert Tison designed a symbol known as the butterfly, made to mark the move to colour television. It stayed until every CBC television program was in colour. A Wayne and Shuster sketch joked that it was the logo of the Cosmic Butterfly Corporation, which tells you how memorable it was.

Burton Kramer and the 1974 gem

The symbol that defines CBC logo history came from Burton Kramer, an American-born designer who had moved to Toronto in late 1965. He had designed the map and directory system for Expo 67 and ran his own design practice from 1967. He designed the CBC symbol in December 1974, and it became the corporation’s most widely recognized mark.

The gem is built from a large letter C at the centre, standing for Canada, surrounded by rings of segments. The blue circle represents the world. Read together, the shapes suggest a signal radiating from one point in every direction, which is exactly what a national broadcaster does. The original 1974 version used 25 geometric segments around that centre.

The animated ident that carried the gem on television earned the nickname the exploding pizza, because the segments flew together like a pizza assembling itself. The 1974 ident first played over a three-note woodwind fanfare, later replaced by an 11-note jingle. That jingle ran until December 31, 1985, and plenty of viewers still remember it.

Why the gem works in CBC logo history

Most broadcast logos of the 1970s were tied to the technology of the day, with antennas, waves or the shape of a picture tube. The gem avoided all of that. It used one letter and a circle, so it could sit on a microphone flag, a truck door or a letterhead without looking dated a decade later.

It also solved a problem the earlier logos never managed. A bilingual broadcaster needs a symbol that belongs to both languages, and the 1958 mark had to stack two names to do it. The gem contained no words at all. The C reads as Canada in English and French alike, so CBC and Radio-Canada could share it.

A short aside on Kramer himself. Before the CBC commission he spent 1966 and 1967 as director of corporate design at Clairtone, the Canadian stereo maker. Toronto’s design scene of that period, covered in Toronto design history, produced several identities that outlived the firms that made them. The gem is one that did not need to.

The 1986 one-colour redraw

On January 1, 1986, the gem changed for the first time. Hubert Tison, who had drawn the butterfly two decades earlier, and Robert Innes created a one-colour version. It usually appeared as dark blue on white or white on dark blue, which made the gem easier to print and to reproduce on screen at small sizes.

The 1986 ident added its own twist. The background colour changed with the time of day, so the same mark could feel like morning or late evening, and a new five-note synthesized jingle replaced the 11 notes. The corporation turned 50 that year, and a gold-plated version of the gem marked the anniversary.

1992 and the red C in CBC logo history

The 1992 redraw is the version on screens in 2026. A design firm simplified the gem again, cutting the 25 segments of 1974 down to 13 and turning the central C into a plain red circle. The result is redder, cleaner and more open, and the red in the middle also reads as a nod to Canada.

Since the early 2000s the 1992 symbol has also appeared in white, and sometimes red, on textured or coloured backgrounds. It has become the longest-used logo in CBC logo history, already older than the 1974 gem was when it was retired. For comparison, the Air Canada logo history shows a similar habit of patient, infrequent updates.

Reading the 1974 gem next to the current mark

Placed side by side, the two versions show how much the 1992 change was about subtraction. The 1974 gem had more pieces and a busier rhythm, which suited a large screen in a living room. The current mark keeps the radiating idea with almost half the segments, so it survives as a tiny icon on a phone.

The underlying drawing never changed, and that is the real lesson of CBC logo history. Three redraws in five decades kept Kramer’s structure intact while adjusting colour and detail. The pace matches what the logo redesign frequency report finds for long-lived brands, and it puts the gem among the steadiest famous logos in Canada.

Where the CBC gem sits among Canadian symbols

Canadian identity design of the 1960s and 1970s leaned on simple geometry. The Air Canada rondelle arrived in 1965, and retailers such as the one in the Canadian Tire logo history built their marks around a single bold shape. The CBC gem belongs to the same family, though it uses no maple leaf at all.

In 2018 Burton Kramer was appointed to the Order of Canada, having already been named to the Order of Ontario. By then the 1974 gem had been redrawn twice by other hands, but its centre still pointed back to his letter C. You can still spot the old 1974 version on archival broadcasts, still flying together like a pizza.