It's taken me a few days to get around to this, I know nobody's thinking 'Where is VMPhil with his tribute?!' but I still feel a bit bad so sorry.
Immensely saddened at hearing this news. I kind of can't believe it, especially as he'd just appeared in the Sound of TV programme, though I know that would have been recorded ages ago.
Martin Lambie-Nairn influenced TV design greatly in the 80s and 90s and all for the better. Virtually every other TV company tried to copy his Channel 4 identity during the 1980s with their own flying computer graphics (which were never as good). Naturally, when he and his design agency made the 1991 idents for BBC1 and BBC2, they avoided using computer graphics as much as possible, and came up with probably the only set of TV idents that were loved as much as the programmes with the 2s.
For me, as I have probably blathered on about a bit too much over the years, I remain a huge fan of his work for the BBC's 1997 rebrand. Taking on a huge organisation with a hundred million different logos for channels and departments, coming up with a new master logo, a new brand template, that needed to work on TV, in print and online. All of which worked and looked good. (And still looks good).
The philosophy behind it, and for I think all of his work, was 'It's not all about the logo!' - you don't have to try and stuff all the brand personality into the logo. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that was the prevailing thought back then, at least not with the clients he was trying to impress this idea upon.
Thankfully I don't have to bore you too much with my love of that particular rebrand since I wrote a whole post about it:
BBC Corporate Identity 1997: 20 Years On - An Appreciation.
It's hard to think of any idents that Lambie-Nairn (the company) designed during the 90s that I don't like. I mean, they even managed to make
Carlton look good, who during the 1999-2002 era had far better looking idents than the generic ITV look we had to put up with in Granadaland.
One of the lesser known examples of Lambie-Nairn's work is The Business Channel, which only existed on Sky for a couple of years in the late 2000s, but once again they designed a cracking identity for it, avoiding the usual business cliches and somehow managing to make a channel with the name 'The Business Channel' look fun. I really recommend
watching his short talk on it, from a video I saved from Google Video before it was shut down, and here is a
playlist of the idents.
I only wish he had done more talks or interviews over the years, as the ones available with his stories of working on these projects are incredibly informative, some of his anecdotes about certain channel controllers are quite amusing! I kind of wish I'd emailed him like Gluben did just to say thanks for being responsible for some great graphic design over the years, but I always found the idea a bit too embarrasing. I mean, it's not often you hear somebody saying 'I'm a big fan of TV idents!' out loud.
Anyway, if you managed to read all of that then you get a star.