What's up, Max?

HBO? Max? WTF? A catastrophe? A genius move?

Fast Company's Elissaveta M. Brandon called me last week to see if I would weigh in.

Look - I’m all in for debates around brand and logos, so I jumped in.

People, especially design people, should be expected to have strong opinions about changes to famous ones. So it's no, no, no surprise that designers were once again jabbing at our screens this week. But this time I fear we may be missing the larger point because, the way I see it, the HBO Max rebrand is smart, strategic brand architecture hiding under a responsible visual redesign.?

HBO is this country’s longest continuously running subscription television service for good reason. Since they launched 50 years ago, they’ve never stopped seeking the frontiers of television. They pioneered the premium channel, free previews, and same-day blockbuster releases. They were the first channel to stream by satellite. And while these technical achievements may have been crucial to HBO’s success, it is NOT what caused people to fall in love with them. It's The Sopranos, Euphoria and Last Week Tonight that places HBO at the forefront of cultural conversations.?

Remember; HBO stood for Home Box Office. So it's the show they give their audience the ticket to that counts.?

Let me repeat that.?

It's the show.

But if you're old like me, you will remember this feeling: Sitting down to watch cable, scrolling over 100 channels and thinking, “There’s nothing on here.”?

Everyone lamented. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it.?

But Disney was watching and learning. They mastered the secret to rising above the noise. People back then didn’t stumble across individual shows; in all of that cable content mess, people intentionally navigated to the brands they understood — ABC, CBS, NBC, Disney Channel, Hallmark and, of course, HBO. So, when the new age of the “streaming wars” came along, Disney got ahead of the game by aggregating some of the world's most iconic and beloved media brands: Star Wars, National Geographic, Marvel and Pixar. From Bambi to Boba Fett to Black Panther to Buried Secrets of Greece to Buzz Lightyear and beyond, Disney+ organized their shows the way people seek all of their purchasing – into distinct, meaningful brands.?

Paramount+ is doing the same thing. (Hello, 31 flavors of Star Trek.)

People return to brands for years, if not generations, because of their enduring promise of very specific, relevant qualities

That laser focus on brand is exactly why dropping HBO from HBO Max was a smart, if not inevitable move.

Here's why:

It protects the HBO brand and allows MAX alone to serve as the gateway, opening up room for a wider variety of other brands, including Cartoon Network and HGTV. As HBO MAX was continuing to fold in the content of Discovery+, with titles like Dr. Pimple Popper (oh dear) and a slew of nutty, but insanely popular reality TV hits, it needed space for new, larger audiences.?

They way I see it, it's clear why the Max name alone was elevated. Leaders at Warner Bros. Discovery understand the risks of diluting HBO's unmatched legacy of original, premium,?adult-focused programming. HBO could not be turned into a gateway for the entirety of a broad and growing content library. The HBO brand would soon snap into a million pointless pieces.?

What about the visual design of new MAX logo itself? The Twittersphere will move on to some other new design hysteria in a few more days, but here’s something to remember.

A logo is never, ever a symbol of brand "quality." It is only a symbol of "the" brand quality. And the quality of storytelling hosted on Max is legendary. As the designer Paul Rand told us, a logo gets its meaning from what it represents and not the other way around. If Max continues to consistently deliver pioneering storytelling in the way Warner Bros., DC, Discovery and HBO have for generations, the audience will fall in love with the Max logo soon enough. And in the very same way they did with Bellatrix Lestrange, Batman and Bran Stark.

Me? I'm already there. And bravo to the people at Max and their design firm Dixon Baxi.?

Me? I would have kept the purple. It was differentiating in a lookalike landscape.

But you can make for it, Max.

Just make more Boardwalk Empire, please.?

And put Bugs Bunny back on.