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TV idents have come a long way since the days of wobbly knights and slowly revolving globes. Gavin Lucas reveals their central role in broadcast branding: a role that is set to become even more vital as TV channels face up to an uncertain future
The days of the testcard are long gone. The spaces between television programmes are now packed with all manner of promotional messages as beleaguered broadcasters fight for audience share in a fragmented TV universe. With last year's D&AD Gold for Channel 4, major recent rebrands and campaigns for ITV and Five, plus an upcoming rebrand for BBC 1, television channels, it seems, are turning to design and branding as never before.
In the UK at least, the idea of using interstitial space for promotion and branding began with Lambie-Nairn's work for, first, the launch of Channel 4 in 1982 and later BBC 1 and 2. "We probably started the whole thing by embracing an advertising technique - putting up different versions of the logo in each junction rather than the same one each time," claims Martin Lambie-Nairn. "It breathed creativity into the ident."
"We then moved on from animating logos and tried to understand what the channel's positioning was and to show that in an emotional way," he explains. Which is where we are now - TV channels using the space between programmes both to engage the viewer with upcoming attractions and to run complex branding messages.
"The ident is the visual representation of the personality of a given TV channel," says Eve Rawlinson, who worked on the ITV rebrand as a senior account director at Red Bee Media, the independent studio recently spun out of the old BBC graphics department. "They're about creating a tone of voice." The term ident itself is somewhat confusing, suggests Rawlinson, with different channels applying it to different areas of activity. Broadly speaking, suggests her colleague at Red Bee, creative director Tim Platt, "there are different areas of ident work: straight programme promotion, pure idents (which really are a four or a two) and this territory which is, I guess the newest and most interesting area, which sits somewhere between the two." In this latter category, he would place work...