Branding Carlton

For the last couple of years the Twitter account @carlton_media has been posting interesting pieces of archive from the much-loved* former ITV company Carlton. The person behind the account is now in ownership of the Carlton logotype and some other former assets.

Recently they have been interviewing a number of former Lambie-Nairn people who were involved with the 1999 'stars' branding. I asked if these could be published, and now the first interview with the Lambie-Nairn Creative Director at the time, Brian Eley, is available to read online. It's mainly about Carlton and ITV but there are also sections about other work for the BBC, Discovery, O2, and Lambie-Nairn in general.

http://www.carltonmedia.org/uploads/1/0/0/1/10014606/brian_eley_interview_-_online_release_g.pdf


*This may not be true.

They made an ident for Juliet Bravo!?

Ironically he talks about people mistaking ITV shows for BBC earlier in the interview…

He's bang on the money when he talks about the current state of channel branding.

The final Carlton idents probably the last truly great set of purely animated idents.

I loved Carlton. I don't see why people didn't like it. All it did was single-handedly destroy ITV...

It was a branding masterclass from a company that didn't care about what it was supposed to do, focusing on its own sinister plans of world domination. An act of evil but looking good as it went about it. Like being stabbed to death by Tom Hardy.

Not single-handedly.

When you look at ITV today, remember Granada have the lion share of the merger with a 51%/49% split in their favour. People will moan about Carlton on how they removed the identity of Central and Westcountry but Granada's generic branding with the hearts during 1999-2002 made the regional logos tiny with the text of the station in the same font, let alone the stripping back of programming, staff and studios from the around the UK.

ITV plc = 68% Granada Media Group, 32% Carlton Communications.

Might have been different if Carlton had managed to get hold of UNM..