On Friday Grant Gilbert, of Double G Studios, gave a lecture on his life from National Diploma Graphics at Stockport College to the position he is in today. After college he went onto do a BA Graphic Design degree in Birmingham and from there he went onto work at Planet 24 for 3 years where he designed the phone and fax number boards. Not the most inspiring job but you have to start somewhere and make lots of tea!
He then moved to Channel 4 for 3 years where he worked with a bigger budget and on the C4 identity using lots of film and video. After this he had a couple of jobs including working at Attic in New York but 8 years ago he decided to be freelance as he likes to make new relationships and not be told what to do! Double G Studios is pretty much only himself but it sounds more substantial to clients and it makes it easier to recruit other workers but rather than sitting at home doing nothing he likes to sit within companies. At C4 Grant designed a lot of the idents and was responsible for getting lighting, cameramen, body suits and neons etc. He used a tent some lights and neon tubing along with some people to create a real eye catching flowing video and showed Graphic Design doesn't need to be flat. It can be Live Action. He has also done a lot of work involving More4.
More 4's logo was designed by Spin and Grant was told to bring it to life and add colour. After lots of wild developments and animations the result was simply the green logo on a plain black background. This reinforced his idea that Simple design is the best.
Grant likes to take snippets out of the brief and exploit them. This can be seen when he was commisioned by the BBC to rebrand BBC1. The current logo was a red box with BBC1 in which was went to symbolise rhythm and movement but looked boring and not special enough for the BBC. He sought to make the logo softer and show the unity and coming together that the BBC want to achieve. He came up with the idea of circles which show unity and set about looking at how it could be used within a typeface and the idents. He decided to make the circle 'O' in 'one' the centre of the screen. When making the logo they tried lots of typefaces but weren't happy so they had one designed specially by Font Smith which needed to be happy and rounded but not to modern. Then the points to be considered were how it looked with circles and how big to have it on the screen. This ended up taking 2 weeks itself! Also the Off Air promotion had to be looked at with posters etc. The ident circles were created using mountain bike circles,ring a roses and an animation of swimming hippo's aswell as a lot of others. The swimming hippo's caused a lot of controversy when they were highlighted when it was found out the BBC had used 1.2 million pounds in doing the rebrand and taking 10 months. Grant found this funny as the best projects get the most complaints.
Grant was also heavily involved in the rebranding of Channel 5.
He tells us that 70% of the time he is pitching work which can often be for free and get work mainly by word of mouth and repeat work. As the top TV companies all work together at the top his name gets around quickly so their isn't any rivalry or contracts. His favourite job was working with the Neons for Channel 4 as it all came together perfectly and he was left to his own devices.
Grant is currently a Foreman for the judges of the D&AD Commercial Awards and chooses the people who should judge this year's competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment