Channel 4: Type Culture and Post-Iconic Brands
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Brody1
- Type
- K - Design
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The main output of Brody’s ‘Channel 4: Type culture and post-iconic brands’ research is a proprietary typeface family which is used exclusively and extensively across all of Channel 4’s touchpoints: broadcast, digital content, streaming, print and advertising. In 2016 Brody was approached by Alice Tonge, then Director of Channel 4’s in-house design team, to co-initiate and contribute to the development a new strategy for communication and identity. Brody’s role was to examine how the broadcaster’s visual identity could be updated for post-digital environments, foregrounding storytelling devices and reducing the organisation’s reliance on traditional icon-centric forms including the core logo.
Brody developed and led a series of workshops involving Brody Associates designers and the Channel 4 in-house design team to explore cultural values and influences in typeface design within the context of counter-normative brand identities, narratives, voices and content. The workshops focused on identifying social or communal codes within typeface design and examining their potential to produce specific perceptual and emotional outcomes. Brody employed the collective insights to support a process of re-imagining the Channel 4 brand as a set of deconstructed component parts reconstituted as a more holistic identity. This innovative strategy allowed for greater flexibility and experimented with evolutionary approaches to typeface design, brand identity and public communication.
The typeface has been extensively used by Channel 4 over the past five years in all of its communications. It has become synonymous with the channel itself and is frequently applied instead of the Channel 4 logo. Award-winning and widely referenced, Brody’s design-led approach is recognised as a best practice strategy for building post-iconic brand identities for broadcasters and publishers, particularly in the context of digital media. The project has been disseminated through a number of presentations and lectures and has been widely covered in the media.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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