Branding Carlton

Looking back at those "unused hearts", they're really quite poor and we probably only fawned over them back in the day because they weren't quite as bad as what eventually made it on air.

It's no surprise that Carlton rejected them but it's still a bit odd that they went with the heart theme but added a star to their branding. To me it clashes to have an ident all about hearts and finish on an end board of stars.

The unused hearts were by no means perfect, particularly how the logo formed up at the end. In fact, it's something I explored in some mocks a few years ago:



As for why Carlton went for hearts and stars, that's explained in the interview which started this thread.

At the time, the killing-off of the Central and Westcountry brands (even though the latter was just over 7 years old) was a shock but what Carlton put out looked so much better than what GMG/United went for.

They still wouldn't look out of place today I don't think.

And then of course HTV had its cake and ate it by using Carlton idents with its own logo.

You say purely animated idents, but they were mostly shot on film with video effects added to give the impression of full CGI.

Most revolved around a giant vacuum formed plastic heart. If you see an heart rotating or backlit in any of the idents, it's the same heart, and it's real, not CGI.

Now you know that, see how many times you can spot it in use across the package (Clue: it's a lot)



Even this is the same plastic heart:

Hm, learn something new every day. Carlton heart on the idents was plastic? Well I never.

It was a beautiful package, I really liked it at the time, it was so visually stunning, knocked everything else out the park and I still really like it now.

I appreciate presentation has moved away from that sort of style now to "people" idents and they will struggle to compete against CGI in a lot of cases, but whether they're any more effective in the branding stakes (or cheaper) is up for debate.

I think the mixture of perspex/plastic with creative lighting and CGI effects creates some amazing idents.

See also:

http://identcentral.co.uk/media/idents/itv/regions/granada/1995/31.jpg
http://identcentral.co.uk/idents/itv/itv-regions/granada/granada-1995-1999/

http://www.thisisfive.co.uk/presbits/bbc/parliament/2002/ident06.jpg
http://www.thisisfive.co.uk/presbits/bbc/parliament2002a.shtml

I believe this initial design from English & Pockett was the inspiration for the Carlton idents rather than the filmed footage ITV ended up with.



The scene at 18 seconds looks a lot like the first ident in this video:

There’s also something rather BBC Two Artsnight about that hearts sequence.

The GMG regions did at least get to use some of those images for their breakbumpers.


It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Carlton said no. It took LWT a little while longer (internal politics no doubt) but at least they got there in the end with the impressive videowall ident.

Weren't those ITV hearts on the trailers too, reduced to a small square.

The videowall idents were less of a response to the ITV hearts, more a response to Carlton's package. The story goes that LWT argued they needed their pres to stand up against that of their weekday rival. After all, they were still competing for attention (advertising) at that stage.