Logo Presentation

Central's cake was already gone even before the 1999 generic idents came in though, therefore it's among those that I said were already gone. Anglia I'll admit I forgot about. The A flag, of course, debuted in 1988.

As for Granada, this is what they were planning to replace the familiar G-arrow with:
http://thetvroom.com/images/pool-ex/ex-032/main-001-02.jpg

I've said this before, but the Welcome to Yorkshire logo, especially with the yellow and black colouring reminds me of something Yorkshire Television's logo could have evolved to.

I'm pretty certain the regional logos were always going to go, regardless of the nature of their individual designs. The unified ITV, if not wanting to do away with the regions entirely, has at least wanted them to be no more significant than BBC regions. Hence, 'Central' is just a word used as a regional designation, the same as 'Midlands' for the BBC. Nothing more.

Ye gods! That looks hideous! Like something you might see in a bad mock ... but worse!

The Central cake was removed in 1998 and its removal was directly caused by the consolidation of regional ITV. It was a political decision by Carlton and not one on the merits of the cake. So, I put its removal in the same bracket as the G arrow, Anglia flag etc.

I've seen that Granada cap before. I think GMG had a site called Ballistixx or something like that with all sorts of potential and hypothetical presentation items for ITV and third parties. There's nothing, so far as I know, that suggests that was ever realistically going to become Granada's main ident. All evidence immediately prior to the hearts idents coming in was that GMG North was heading for a twin window look, with station ident in the left pane and some live action in the right, with station logos spinning in the background. We saw the unfinished article in the regional-only idents for Yorkshire, as well as the Christmas idents for GMG North of that year. All evidence suggests the normal G Arrow was to be used in this aborted look. That caption you show could easily just be a drawing board idea. It could also be a logo for GMG as distinct from the regional TV station. A longer shot but still possible is that it could have been an early stage proposal to rebrand all GMG North stations Carlton-style.

Yes but isn't the point that if a region had a classic graphical logo like an eye or a peacock that wasnt tied to a former name or a geographical area they could well have retained it. The only one that fitted that description was that hideous Meridian sun!

I don't personally believe any regional logos would ever had been retained, regardless of their merits. They were removed on principle; the same way Netto's branding was removed on principal when it was bought by Asda.

I'm not sure that's true...

The regional logos remaining would be conditional on the regions remaining, so we've got to put ourselves in that parallel universe really where they are still strong today.

Unlike the 90s they'd have to go beyond the Channel 3 licence - the usual marketing jargon about it's use online, in social media and apps - plus I suspect most regional companies would have digital channels too exploiting their content nationally.

Granada and Yorkshire are about as simple as logos can be so would definately have survived IMO, along with Tyne Tees. Central would probably have lost it's 3D element but the essential logo remained. As for the rest I'm not too sure - Anglia's and LWT's might have been simplified (as the latter was on the production endcaps towards the end), but others IMO may not have survived until today.

Taking it back on topic slightly I guess TV wise that the BBC logo is now probably the 4th longest running logo in UKTV behind C4, ITN and Eurosport, whose logos are essentially the same as they were 25 years ago despite being tweaked over the years.

The important thing to remember about the BBC logo is that it doesn't just need to work as a logo in its own right, it needs to be flexible enough to fit into many other logos, not least around 70 television channel and radio station logos.

The great strength of the current logo is because it is quite plain and basic, it works in pretty much any scenario you might wish to place it, including those that have been designed many years after the logo itself was designed and the original branding guidelines surrounding it had been abandoned. (The intention when it was designed was that all logos would be formed simply by putting plain Gill Sans text after it. That has long since ceased to be the case, but the logo still works being placed into the more elaborate logos we have these days). It also works at tiny size, such as on the icons that appear on programme pages on the BBC website.



I don't think that logo idea is all that versatile. Although it looks okay as a logo in its own right (although I think the letters could do with being a bit more spaced out), if you tried to incorporate it into other logos, it would just look fussy and awkward. For example, if you wanted to create a channel logo by putting that BBC logo in a box, adding a word underneath and centering the lot, it wouldn't work because the letters in that logo are off-centre, so the text underneath would not be aligned with it.

A logo like that would restrict what you could do with it, whereas with the current logo is much more flexible, which is why it looks to me almost impossible to improve upon it.

Worth noting that that the NBC peacock in its present form only dates from 1986 and the logotype has been revised even more recently - NBC went through a bit of a branding crisis immediately prior to its introduction including the infamous "N" logo which was lifted from a PBS affiliate in Nebraska.

I'd argue that the CBS eye is a much better execution of the idea than ATV's which just screams "1950s" to me, particularly because of the letters vertically in the middle, an execution you don't see much these days.. The Central cake is one of the best TV logos ever on the other hand, and had regional ITV not consolidated would easily work just as well today (despite its origins as a modification of the original globe ident).

Any other suggestions to what ITV would have looked like in 2002 IF they didn't merge into the national branding?