Martin Lambie Nairn passed away aged 75 in December 2020.
I found about this news from this YouTube video which can be seen as a tribute to him.
References and Further info
This is not the first time I talked about Martin Lambie-Nairn. I talked about his contribution to television in a blog post back in 2015. - The Art of the Ident - The Legacy of Channel 4
Brand Identity for Television: With Knobs On - Martin Lambie-Nairn (Phaidon Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-7148-3447-4)
Here is a show reel from 1996 showing his ident work from the time this book was published.
Like many designers working this century, he has his own website, which shows examples of his work. There's also a YouTube channel showing his company's output.
He has done a few presentations that have ended up online. This one contains a video he did explaining the rebranding of the BBC. It's worth watching.
The creation of the BBC 2 idents were a subject in a 1995 episode of How Do They Do That? The clip is on YouTube.
CRAFT: The man who made TV sponsorship idents sexy - Belinda Archer, Campaign (13th June 1997)
A 1983 show reel of CG work by Bo Gehring and Associates, which includes the Channel 4 ident.
Two Types: The Faces of Britain (BBC 4, 2017) - presented by Mark Ovenden. It is an adaptation of
Johnston and Gill: Very British Types - Mark Ovenden (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2016, ISBN-13 : 978-1848221765)
They are a number of YouTubers whose thing is posting clips of old TV idents and some take a critical eye to them. One is Adam Martyn, who has done a complete review of the BBC 2 idents of the 90s.
He has also done -
His idents (and others) can be looked at in the following sites.
tvark.org - A great place to find old TV.
Until the 1990s, television channels rarely thought about how to market themselves. There was little competition before then, so there was little need to really ferment a brand for themselves to make them stand out on the screen while viewers channel-hop. They were fine with splashing their logo before a programme starts and on print ads. No consistency existed in all a channel’s graphics. Then came satellite and cable TV and the loads of new channels they delivered. Now TV channels needed to think about marketing if they wanted to keep viewers. One British creative was way ahead of them, and was doing such work on British TV for a decade. Marin Lambie-Nairn can be credited for changing how TV channels saw themselves and, as a result, the TV industry itself.
“Martin changed the face of TV idents because he takes a long time before considering an identity. He wants total understanding of the corporation and does a lot of groundwork. He is importing the infrastructure of advertising into the world of design, by doing lots of work on the project before thinking of the creative idea.” - Mike Dempsey, president D&AD (1997)
Beginnings
Born in 1945, Martin graduated from Canterbury College of Art in 1965. He got inspired to work in TV when Arnold Schwartzman did a lecture and showed off a roller-caption he made for music show Ready Steady Go. “I was deeply impressed; so glamorous was the image, that I felt the urge to step forward and touch that roller-caption.” At age 19, he became the youngest assistant graphic designer at BBC TV – for Alan Jeapes. He made maps for a World War I programme and a few title sequences. He was even cast to kiss a secretary for a title sequence for Top of the Pops, which was later edited out. In 1967, aged 21, he moved to Rediffusion, becoming the youngest designer to work in TV at the time. But when Rediffusion lost its franchise in 1968, Martin decided to jump ship. But he struggled in the commercial world, leading to Arnold rescuing him nine months later, making him an art director for Conran Design Group. It didn’t work out. Fortunately, two months later he found a gig in ITN.
The Current Affairs Era
It was at ITN Martin’s career began flourish. At the time, ITV was making the transition to colour, and ITN’s graphics needed improving. Shoddy work was forgivable in black-and-white. “It was fascinating to be at the centre of news events as they unfolded. Whether handling the space race or elections, I got a buzz as a designer that perhaps no other design field could have provided.” He did graphics for their coverage of the Apollo missions and did the title sequence for New at Ten. That gig caused some friction with colleagues, which led to Martin to leaving to LWT in 1970. While there, he worked with Colin Robinson. They melded so well that, in 1976, they formed a company - Robinson Lambie-Nairn (later renamed Lambie-Nairn & Company). After formation, they got the contract to do the graphics for current affairs show Weekend World. It involved working from Saturday to Sunday afternoon, which suited Martin perfectly. Before, current affair shows used graphics in the same style as newspaper cartoons. Martin changed that, exploring the true potential of TV as a visual communicator of complex information. He won an award for a sequence depicting how a Soviet invasion of Europe could trigger a nuclear war and Weekend World became the current affairs show on TV.
Martin did admit he once nearly caused an international incident when he made a map that showed Namibia detached from South Africa.
In 1988, Martin designed this logo for the BBC’s 9 o’clock news bulletin. Viewers hated it, comparing it to Nazi symbolism.
Spitting Image
While working on Weekend World Martin was a fan of radio satire comedy Week Ending. He thought it would be a great idea that this comedy got visualized on TV. One night he had a thought – puppets! And that ideal people to do it were Peter Fluck and Roger Law. At the time, Luck and Flaw were making caricature sculptures that got printed in magazines worldwide. After a few years of finding someone to produce it and someone to broadcast it, the resulting show, Spitting Image, aired on ITV in 1984.
From Paint to Pixel
“Lambie-Nairn put more blood on the walls of Soho than anyone else. And a good job he did. He pushed animation houses to the limit and it needed to be done.” – John Vice, Computer Graphics expert and professor at Middlesex Polytechnic.
Martin was introduced to computer graphics while working at LWT. An artworker in the art department had seen a sequence in the 1975 Bob Godfrey film Great - a rotating wireframe animation of the Great Eastern. He, and others in the department, marched to the Imperial College, London, to see it. Soon, he (briefly) signed up on a course taught by John Vince at Middlesex Polytechnic. The first time Martin used CG was for the title sequence for the 1982 documentary Music in Time.
“During the development of Channel 4’s identity, I realized that it did not matter in the slightest whether what we were doing was state of the art or not. The technology itself does not matter. What is important is the design idea; technology is simply a tool to help express it, a means to an end.” – Martin Lambie-Nairn
Martin’s Blocky Four
“… a logo is only one part of the overall identity programme. It is just the ‘signature’, if you like. In the television executive’s mind, the channel’s identity is typically logo-centric, but an identity has to link between programmes and support the public perception of the channel, not just hold the screen at set moments.” – Martin Lambie-Nairn
In 1982 Martin was given, what he called, a “basic design job” that put him on the graphic design history books - the branding of the UK’s newest TV channel. The idea of the Channel 4 logo design came about when Martin researched the channel’s philosophy. Channel 4 is a patchwork of content from various sources – like building blocks. He also took along David Davies idea of the three TV colour bars forming a 4. They liked the idea of using bright coloured blocks that move together to form the logo.
After getting approval of the logo design, he tried creating it (with the help of Tony Pritchett) by making a wireframe animation with a Teletronix 4054 and a plotter. The result was then turned into a traditional cel animation. It didn’t work, due to lack of lighting and shadow. No one in the UK at the time had the means to make what he wanted, so he gave the work (and a tape of Tony’s data) to Bo Gehring Aviation of Los Angeles, California. CG logos were used on UK TV before, but the Channel 4 ident was the first to use advanced 3D graphics. After a couple of hick-ups the Channel 4 ident finally aired on 2nd November 1982. The channel had a rocky start, but its branding proved a winner. He was awarded a gold and a silver pencil from D&AD for it in 1983.
The 4 logo is based on the typeface Clarendon Bold.
“Can you do smooth, coloured beans as well as coloured blocks?” Billy Mawhinney and Nick Welsh of J Walter Thompson ad agency asked Martin when working for a commercial for Smarties. The answer was yes. The first of six commercials aired in 1984.
Branding the 2
When Alan Yentob took charge of BBC 2 in 1988 it was branded using a non-inspiring “TWO,” designed by BBC Senior Designer, Alan Jeapes (who also designed the opening title sequence to EastEnders).
"I realised there was a problem almost as soon as I took over the channel. It was obvious that the logo made absolutely no impact. In fact, it was something anyone could have told you. It was singularly unmemorable, and told you nothing about the personality of the channel." - Alan Yentob (controller of BBC 2 1988-93)
“When the research came back, we were really surprised, because what it told us was that the audience thought BBC 2 was dull and worthy, which is a bit of a shock to everyone involved.” - Martin Lambie-Nairn, How Do They Do That? (BBC, 1995)
At the time, every channel was represented with neat shiny animated computer graphics – like Channel 4. Martin decided to do something different. Something that represented BBC 2’s personality. So he went into a radical direction – live action video art. No TV channel used idents like this up to this point in history.
“We took this two … there is something special about this, actually. It’s a very distinctive two. It has very sharp bits on it and its rather nice and fat. The reason we wanted that particular two is because we wanted to do things with it, and so you need lots of body on the two in order to achieve that.” - Martin Lambie-Nairn, How Do They Do That? (BBC, 1995)
Martin and Daniel Barber created the original series of 11 idents. More were made later. BBC2’s new look aired Saturday 16th February 1991. Initially, the channel’s programme director didn’t like them and wanted to pull them within two weeks. But he changed his mind after a dinner with Charles Saatchi and Richard Rodgers, who really liked them. And the audience agreed.
“[six months later] The results were absolutely phenomenal, because all the negatives that came out in the first part of the research – dull and worthy – had disappeared entirely … sophisticated and witty and amusing and all these kind of words started coming out.” - Martin Lambie-Nairn, How Do They Do That? (BBC, 1995)
This series of idents have become a public favourite, to the point that the “2” was getting fan mail. It is claimed that four years after rebranding, BBC 2 was the only British TV channel to experience an increase in market share and average viewing hours. Martin and Dan won a BAFTA award for them – which was presented to them by the programme director that was going to pull them off air. The “2” remained part of the channel’s identity until 2018.
At the same time, Martin Lambie-Nairn and Daniel Barber redesigned the BBC 1 ident. It premiered the same day as the BBC 2 ident.
Rebranding the whole of Aunt Beeb
Until 1997 the BBC used a logo that was proving hard to work with upcoming digital technology. And it didn’t help that it was used freely with little restrain, resulting in a menagerie of logos that looked like separate entities than components of a larger corporation. This is where Martin stepped in.
“The BBC logo had gone out of control. Just about anybody who had a budget in the BBC would commission a new logo. The main logo itself …. didn’t work in black and white, so not only do we have that problem, we had, sort of, 180 different logo types at the BBC was sort of using. So the entire identity of the BBC was been fragmented rather than strengthened.” - Martin Lambie-Nairn, from Two Types – The Faces of Britain (BBC, 2017)
In 1997 the BBC went through a massive rebrand. The logo was altered to make it monochrome, saving a lot on printing the multi-coloured predecessor. It was straightened to work better on screens and had its bottom bars removed, because they “disappeared” when scaled down. The final touch was the choice of typeface – Gill Sans. This sans serif typeface was first created by Eric Gill in 1926, who later created sculptures for BBC’s Headquarters in the 1930s. It has since become a “timeless” design, used a lot as a “nicer” alternative to Helvetica.
“The Gill Sans typeface we found was very elegant and very sort of timeless. We wanted a typeface which didn’t necessary reflect an awful lot of personality because it’s actually the identities of the channels and the radio stations which carry the personality.” – David Howe, Creative Director, Broadcasting and Presentation, BBC Television - Right to Reply (Channel 4, 1997)
“Quite frankly, the old logo just simply didn’t work on television because it was sloping…” - Martin Lambie-Nairn, from Two Types – The Faces of Britain (BBC, 2017)
The previous logo, introduced in 1988, was designed by Michael Peters. The three colour bars at the bottom were generally seen as red, green and blue – the colour of the phosphors on TV screens. But it came in regional variations - BBC Scotland’s were all blue. Wales were red. Northern Ireland was green. It was commissioned by BBC’s corporate office, which is why it worked fine on letterheads, but didn’t on TV.
Branding Oxygen
Lambie-Nairn has worked on branding other things than just broadcasters. The best example is in 2001, when British Telecom decided to rebrand its mobile phone network – BT Cellnet. Lambie-Nairn pitched an idea. “Sifting through research we discovered a customer comment that unlocked the problem: ‘I would never leave home without my mobile, it’s essential for life.’ Looking for a metaphor to express ‘essential for life’ we turned to oxygen – O2.” – from http://ml-n.com/work/o2/
And so BT Cellnet became O2.
These air bubbles were photographed by London-based photographer Jonathan Knowles.
For confused non-Brits – ITV (Independent Television) was made up of about a dozen regional stations, such as LWT (London Weekend Television). Each provide their own content as well as carry national content, such as national news bulletins. ITN (Independent Television News) is the news organisation that creates these bulletins. They call themselves “independent” because they were the first commercial TV channel in the UK – as in funded by advertising. Before, the semi-stated owned BBC is funded by a “licence fee” subscription.
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