ITV X Motion Graphics collaboration

Fiona Skinner, the Head of Design at ITV Daytime and Laurie Griffiths, the Deputy Head of Design worked with Tim Platt, the course leader on the motion graphics course to set the students a real-life brief. 

The brief that was set by ITV challenged students to refresh an existing brand. The students were given the choice of two brands to work on, both of which ITV currently broadcast on air. The aim of the brief was to create a refreshed brand look, while still maintaining a sense of its core identity. 

Fiona and Laurie were incredibly impressed with the students’ work and are in discussions with course leader Tim about potential future collaborations. We caught up with Fiona to discuss the project and how the students addressed the brief. 

How long did you give the students to complete the work? 

It was quite a quick turnaround. We only gave the students six weeks to complete the project.  

This fairly tight deadline was quite realistic considering the sorts of deadlines we are given in our work. Sometimes we might only have six days, or even six hours to turn a piece of work around, so we felt it was great practice to give the students a taste of how fast-paced the work can be too. 

How do you feel the students approached the task? Were you pleased with the results?  

We were really impressed with the results. The quality of the ideas and the amount of effort the students put into the work was excellent. We thought Tim’s methods for teaching and conveying the brief was outstanding too.  

What do you think the students can use this opportunity for ultimately? 

 Hopefully the project has opened their eyes to a different field that they might not have thought about previously.  

We showed them our showreel to help them to understand how they might design a brand that millions of people can see; something that would appear in everyone’s homes, on laptops and on people’s phones. Hopefully it helped educate the students about different career opportunities. 

What were your hopes for the partnership? 

Students don’t tend to know that we exist, and if they do, they don’t tend to think about going into broadcast. It was about opening their eyes to what’s possible and communicating to them what a great place ITV is to work. 

What was the ultimate aim of the brief? 

To see what understanding the students had in terms of ITV and motion graphics.  

A lot of the team at ITV come from a broadcast background, and this has a lot of emphasis on design. We have found that the focus of many design colleges and courses is print and more logo-based, and often they aren’t thinking about movement or the entire scene. 

We wanted to give the motion graphics students a challenge and we were intrigued to see what they came up with in. They could choose from a couple of projects, and we were really interested to see how they would approach the brief.  

 What was the task that you gave the students?  

The task was around refreshing an existing brand design and focused on two brands that we already work with.  

The first was a campaign against breast cancer, ‘Change and Check’, which has been operating for a couple of years and airs on our Lorraine programme. It is already a very successful campaign and a well-established brand, so the challenge here was to design something new, while retaining the brand’s core identity. 

The second brand was Martin Lewis, who is a money-saving expert and a regular presenter on ITV, as well as having his own programme. This one was around working with an infographic, which could, on paper, be a bit drier. For this brief the students had to consider how to bring this to life. 

We thought we would give the students two projects to choose from, because the two are so distinctly different and so would appeal to completely different audiences.