Screen test for design

The first leg of the Scotland v England Euro 2000 football debacle on 13 November was broadcast free on the Internet. Curiously, perhaps, the event had the full backing of BSkyB, which owned the broadcast rights to the game and was charging TV customers for the same live coverage.

Even though on the Internet the match could only be viewed in a frame 50 to 75mm wide, the event was highly symbolic. Broadcasters everywhere, it was said, were under no illusions that their grip on viewers was being challenged. Another TV revolution could be on its way.

Next week, as Channel 4 airs the first reworkings of its screen identity created by Static – the group which came up with the dark, minimalist idents for Film Four, and the adrenaline-charged UEFA champions league titles for ONdigital – any consultancy designing for broadcast will do well to remember that this change is virtually upon us.

Consultancies involved in channel branding, screen identities, titles, animation, platform development, programming and strategy are beginning to watch which way broadcast companies are moving, and to anticipate the repercussions on designing for the screen.

“As TV changes over the next 12 months, the challenges facing the traditionally conservative broadcasting companies and the traditional design companies they use are going to be immense,” says Static director of creative strategy Mark Rock.

Rock, whose clients are nearly all broadcasters and platform owners, ponders how the predicted explosion of channels resulting from the digital boom can do anything but drag down design quality when, with a fixed audience, design budgets will inevitably be shaved.

“I think budgets are bound to fall. We have seen them drop in the last year or so. But then the price of the technology has dropped too, and this has enabled groups like us to do more in-house. It’s very bad news for post [production] houses,” he says.

Not that budgets for broadcast design are great now, Rock maintains. “The only time you are given a good budget is when you have a producer or a director who believes in the value of the graphics,” he says.

Nykris Digital Design was involved in the UK WebTV test with Microsoft, and designed the EPG for ONdigital. Nykris creative director Nikki Barton has seen budgets for TV projects drifting downwards.

“I think the amount of money available is generally going down. There is less money to produce titles, but then there are increasingly more content graphics within programmes and this is making up a lot of the balance,” she says.

Barton suggests there is a fusion between industries reshaping the TV landscape. “The two industries are joining together really. The producers and programme makers on one side and the “traditional” Web designers on the other. However, manipulating the graphic images on TV is a whole new art to doing it on the Web,” she says.

English & Pockett creative director Rob Machin works closely with clients like ITV and Discovery Europe. He too is seeing a very real shift in the work his consultancy is being asked to do.

“We found that 75 to 80 per cent of the work we used to do was in broadcast, but that is changing. We are doing more and more interactive work – with interactive TV and the Internet. It is a natural redistribution, but design is not being supported less,” he says

Screen design is, however, changing, and changing quickly. “It used to be quite difficult to find designers because specialists were rare. Now when we take on designers we look for multidisciplinary people,” says Machin. “A lot of designers have become directors, and are putting together whole sequences, as well as doing print and Web design.”

The explosion of TV channels is having a noticeable effect on the distribution of work for established screen design groups. It also seems to be creating opportunities for new design groups.

Machin has seen smaller jobs for individual channels (with budgets of £10 000 to £20 000) going to the “one or two man teams”, while bigger consultancies concentrate on the “umbrella” brand which often makes up a group of channels.

Lambie-Nairn creative director Brian Eley agrees that work now tends to come in bundles, spanning screen designs for TV, the Web and interactive media. Lambie-Nairn works with broadcasters including Carlton and Flextech, and is now part of the WPP Group global marketing services conglomerate.

“In some respects our client base has shifted without us really trying,” says Eley. “Clients we would ordinarily never have come across have come to us with ideas – banks, high street retailers, telephone companies, for example. All of a sudden this convergence we have been hearing about is happening.”

Eley suggests that the question now is whether the new breed of screen clients are prepared to spend as much on their TV services as they are on expensive TV commercials. “They can’t look at it as a soft option,” he says.

In his book Sky High, which charts the perilous rise of satellite and cable TV, Mathew Horsman concludes the TV revolution has had three effects on UK broadcasting. The BBC has been forced to live with the multi-channel market, he observes, and Free TV is “on its way to the museum”. But most importantly, he maintains there is still reason to believe that the UK broadcasting industry will continue to make quality TV.

For the sake of the quality of TV design, let’s hope he is right.