Understanding the design suites of television idents

When a company is creating an ident, they often have to think about how they are going to keep their audience interested and fit in with the current events. They do this buy creating a whole suite of idents, in which there are a number of different idents, rather than just one, and this allows them to adapt their brand to the different situations, for example a company will change their ident to a more festive theme when it’s near Christmas.

Here is an example of BBC Ones X-Mass ident for 2010, this shows that although they have made a different ident, it still keeps to the BBC One format of the red ring around the text.

This ident appeals to BBC Ones target audience, as it is family friendly as it has children in it and does not contain any violence, inappropriate themes or language. The time of day in this ident is set in the evening, possibly symbolising Christmas eve, due to the season it is played and the snowy setting and its Christmas themed music. This ident conveys a very joyous and festive message to the audience as it shows themes of festive activities shown around the time of Christmas.

A channel can also change their ident depending on the following programme, for example this ident bellow could be shown before a science documentary or maybe a sci-fi show for example. This ident appeals the target audience similarly to the last ident, as it does not contain anything that could be deemed offensive. However this advert does not have a clear indication of when it could be shown, but it would probably be aired in the evening (4-10) as that is when most films and sci-fi shows start

Another example of this is the following ident bellow, which could be shown before an urban themed show/documentary or something containing football, either way the format is the same. As for the scheduling of this particular ident, this one is shown mostly in the afternoon, based on the facts that most documentaries are shown in the afternoon, and that the colours in this ident are very dark and blue similar to a typical evening. This kind of ident gives a very strong message of football, and football related shows.

Although these idents may all be different to each other, they all share a few similarities, for example they all have a similar timeframe in which they air, meaning they are shown for about 15-20 seconds. Also they all share the same format in terms of the logo, as they all end up making some kind of circle in the end, representing the BBC One logo.