ITV lets 52 creatives mess around with its logo for new on-air look

The in-house design team at ITV has curated a year-long project, which will see different artists, designers and photographers reinterpret the TV channel’s branding.

ITV has launched a year-long creative initiative, which will see 52 artists create animated versions of its logo that will appear on its main TV channel as idents.

The project, called ITV Creates, will see a range of creative people, including graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and artists, reinterpret the ITV logo in physical form. These will then be animated by ITV Creative, the channel’s in-house agency, and each one will run on TV for a week throughout 2019.

It has been organised by ITV Creative alongside independent artistic director Charlie Levine, who have collaboratively sourced the 52 artists that will take part in the project.

Idents that “live in the real world”

by Katrina Russell Adams

Tony Pipes, executive creative director at ITV Creative, says the brief given to the artists was “quite open”, with the only restrictions being that their artworks needed to be made from physical objects before being animated, and that they should be based on ITV’s typographic logo.

The 52-week-long creative project aims to express the channel’s new brand message of “more than TV”, Pipes says.

“The pieces should be able to live in the real world, beyond their on-air presence and touch an audience in different ways,” he adds.

The artists work across different visual arts disciplines and are from a “diverse range of backgrounds”, says ITV, including both up-and-coming and established creatives.

“Creative organisations can often be insular, so we wanted to open the door and look out, to make our palette richer and the adventure more exciting,” says Pipes. “We wanted it to reflect how ITV opens the door to different writers, directors and performers.”

The idents are being produced throughout 2019. Currently, the first eight idents have been made, which will run throughout January and February.

Project launches with photographer Ravi Deepres

by Ravi Deepres

The first ident comes from artist, photographer and film-maker Ravi Deepres, who has used still and moving photography of landscapes and cityscapes to overlay the ITV logo.

Another two artists who are set to appear in the first eight weeks include Mark Titchner and James Brunt. Titchner has used sound and vibration to reinterpret the logo, while Brunt has used natural material he collected from forests, then later returned, to inform the shapes and colours of his logo.

The project will also see a month dedicated to student artists, whereby ITV Creative will work with universities across the UK to source talent, in a bid to give young artists “opportunities”, says ITV.

Ever-changing on-air look

by James Alec Hardy

Pipes says that the year-long project aims to challenge the idea that TV idents should stay consistent for a long time.

“Idents have traditionally just been used as markers, a moving wallpaper that stays the same on air for years,” he says. “We wanted to break this mould and create something that is always changing. We thought — why not use air-time as an opportunity to showcase talent from the creative community?”

ITV Creative has also tweaked its broadcast logo, working with design studio DBLG. The wordmark is the same, but it now has a cut-out appearance made from three, coloured layers, helping it appear more physical.

ITV’s creative project follows suit with other broadcasters revamping their on-screen branding and idents in recent years. This includes Channel 4, which launched a deconstructed version of its classic Lambie-Nairn-designed logo in 2015, completed by the channel’s in-house team, 4Creative, alongside DBLG. A more recent example is BBC Two, which launched its first rebrand in 20 years in 2018, alongside a new set of animated idents that also opted for a more tactile, physical look.

ITV Creates has now launched with Ravi Deepres’ artwork. Each ident will run on-air for one week, on ITV’s main broadcast channel.

By James Brunt
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  • Patricia Gore March 31, 2020 at 6:18 pm

    I’ve devised a great (in my opinion

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