Channel 4 Ident

The award winning Channel Four identity was designed in 1982 by Robinson Lambie-Nairn. They won the initial pitch against Michael Peters and Wolf Olins. From their initial presentation Lambie-Nairn researched Channel Four’s philosophy and seized the fact that they would be buying all their programmes in, so Channel Four would be a patchwork. Their first idea was to illustrate the coming together of these elements. The first six ideas of ‘coming together’ all implied movement. One idea used the the colours of a television gun (RGB) and Channel Four liked the use of strong colour and agreed the ‘coming together’ theme should be emphasised and developed further. Having created the logo, Lambie Nairn then used a computer to animate outlines of the blocks to the final freeze. The movements were then hand coloured and shot, but it didnt work, it was lacking shadow and lighting. So they decided to go to Los Angeles and Bo Gehring Aviation who specialised in computer animation to have differing sequences of the same basic symbol done entirely on computer, as at the time there was nowhere in the UK to go for this. The results were ground breaking, entertaining and a flawless piece of tv graphic design.