ITV launched with a bold brand re-fresh early this year. Unveiled late into 2012, the logo looked rather exciting to my eyes. Lovely new typeface that flowed and linked the letters together beautifully, creating a really solid union to the logo. Along with the re-vamped logo, ITV brought a whole new colour spectrum to light. Keeping hints to the previous corporate colours in the master logo and smashing mixes of colours to form a ‘changing’ logo affect on program adverts.
Now, I really like the logo. I love the swishy typeface, the fact that the type is linked together and looks really clean and smart. I love the overall feel that is being conveyed by the re-brand and where ITV wants to be placing themselves in the marketplace as a series of channels. However, I have a little niggle with the colour palette. Not the corporate logo, or any specific logo that is used over certain channels in their choices. What I have a problem with is the colour ‘changing’ logos that appear over all of ITV’s programming advertisements. The colours just never seem to fit well over the image that is visible behind the logo. I love the idea, but for me the implementation just doesn’t quite cut the mustard standard wise for such a big broadcasting house.
‘Googling’ the ITV brand re-fresh logo you get up a number of images that have this colour changed logo over an image. These particular images work brilliantly with the colour mixtures shown, but this is not the representation that I see on the gogglebox every evening. What I see, as a discerning design viewer, is a brand palette that doesn’t seem to have any real coherence when spread across the brand as a whole. The colours are too random, and half the time you lose a section of the logo within the background image because it happens to change to that exact colour, effectively blending into the background like a logo ninja. Not particularly great if your wanting your logo to be noticed!
As I said at the beginning, I love the re-freshed branding of ITV. I think it works really well and is giving ascross the right ‘feeling’ to their audiences. I just don’t like the way the colour palette (if there is one), has been implemented.
A rant by Nick, graphic designer.