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BBC Sport new logo and graphics

2017-08-03T09:00:00+00:00

If you’ve visited the BBC Sport website today, you’ll have noticed a few changes as a new brand identity made its debut for the start of the football season, with the roll-out of a new logo and graphics.

This is the first update of BBC Sport brand guidelines in seven years and the work was commissioned to reflect the significant changes in audiences’ consumption of BBC Sport content across TV and digital platforms.

In order to create a more uniform approach across TV and digital platforms, the changes see the familiar BBC Sport yellow updated alongside a new font which has been developed for the entire BBC portfolio.

From today, visitors to the BBC Sport website will be met with the new design. The first TV programme with the new look will be Football Focus, on Saturday 12 at midday on BBC One, followed by Final Score and Match of the Day later in the evening.

The rebrand will then be rolled out across all BBC Sport output, including TV coverage of the athletics from 19 August, PDC darts from 16 September and cycling from 17 September.

The font is called BBC Reith, named after the BBC’s founder Lord Reith, and as well as making our text and branding clearer it will also save the BBC money.

The existing fonts that the BBC uses were developed last century and work well in print - but they’re not always clear enough when they appear in small, digital, spaces, and we’re all reading and watching far more on screens and mobiles these days.

So the new font - which we’ll gradually roll out, starting with sport today - will be easier to read and clearer, especially on small devices.

We also expect it to save us a significant amount of money. We have to pay for licences to use other fonts at the moment, but we won’t have to do this for BBC Reith - so it’s better value as well.

The work on the font has been led by the BBC’s User Experience & Design and Marketing & Audiences teams.

Over time, the new font will start to be used right across the BBC (though the bbc blocks logo itself won't change) and all our broadcast and online output.

We’ll be doing this gradually. Where there is little cost to make the change - such as text on our website - we’ll do it as soon as we can. But we’ll only replace things like signs when they’re worn out or need replacing anyway to avoid extra costs.

We hope you like the changes.

Colin Burns is Chief Design Officer, Design & Engineering

A 'beta' version of the BBC's new homepage

2011-09-21T09:00:00+00:00

In my role as General Manager for News & Knowledge at BBC Future Media, I oversee eight of the 10 major areas (we call these 'products') of BBC Online working with my editorial counterparts - including the BBC homepage. Today, we relaunched the homepage in a test ('beta') version for public use and feedback. The new page is accessible from a link at the top of the current homepage, or directly at beta.bbc.co.uk. I hope that users who give the new homepage a go find it much improved. My colleague James Thornett has written about the relaunch in more detail over on the BBC Internet Blog and would like to know what audiences think. Please leave your feedback comments on his blog post.

As users start to use the new homepage, I wanted to explain why we've introduced changes.

In last year's Strategy Review ('Putting Quality First') we proposed a BBC Online which:

Had half the number of top-level directories, down from the 400 we had then (i.e. /sitename)
Cost 25% less to run (i.e. the BBC Online Service Licence for 2010/11 is Â£135m - we intend to cut spend to Â£100m)
Sent double the traffic we did then to external websites, helping the broader UK digital economy
Made more Nations & Regions content available
And, critically, did 'fewer things, better'.

We're making progress in all of these areas and in January of this year, we outlined how we would address the challenge of doing more with less - importantly a move away from building websites via separate new media budgets, towards one cohesive online service with clear lines of accountability.

But this is more than just sound governance - the changes will create a more distinctive, joined-up service for licence fee-payers which is recognizably 'BBC', and greater clarity for the industry in terms of how much we'll do on the web, setting boundaries for what we will and won't do online.

We've arrived at a BBC Online service comprising ten distinct areas or 'products'. Each product is at a different stage of its life: BBC News and BBC iPlayer are both concrete propositions; others, like the fledgling BBC Knowledge & Learning product are approaching the final stages of definition. All will be built on the same shared infrastructure to allow a more seamless transition between them.

The third dimension to our strategy is to provide greater value for money for licence fee-payers, by broadening access to our products across four screens - beyond the web to mobile, tablet, and connected TV. Our BBC News product demonstrates this commitment: it's available on the web, as a mobile and tablet application, and more recently has been optimized for connected TV, launching on the Samsung Smart TV platform in June.

One service, ten products, four screens

So we summarise this strategy as: 'one service, ten products, four screens'.

The homepage occupies a unique position within BBC Online: though BBC Online is a distinct service, and the homepage a single product within it, editorially the page can show off the breadth of content we make available on the web. But showing this breadth has been our perennial challenge. To date we've made tweaks to a relatively static page to better fulfil this purpose; with the move to a new technical platform, we've had the opportunity to rebuild the page from first for the 9 million-plus average weekly unique browsers.

The new BBC homepage launched in beta today marks a departure from the way we've approached this challenge until now and introduces a new, more visual approach to showing off our content on the web, and eventually on mobile, tablet, and connected TV devices too. Other features include:

Simple filters enabling users to tailor the page based on their interests.
Sliding 'drawers' to reveal more or less detail from showcases of the most popular content from all of BBC Online at any time and real-time listings for BBC TV and Radio.
At-a-glance aspects - news and sport headlines, weather forecasts with lottery and travel news updates to follow, plus traditional index-based navigation for quick look-up.
In time, nations' homepages united into a single product to provide relevant local and national information based on a user's choice of location - a key 'Putting Quality First' commitment.

We believe the redesigned page makes it easier for visitors to find the content they're looking for, whilst discovering something new - I hope you agree.

Phil Fearnley is General Manager for News & Knowledge, BBC Future Media

More about the beta release of the new BBC homepage in the press release on the BBC Press Office web site.

(Hopefully) no more tears: CBBC website relaunch

2011-04-12T10:36:27+00:00

Editor's note: Phil Buckley is in charge of the CBBC web site and he's written a fascinating blog post - full of pictures and anecdotes - in which he talks about the special challenges of updating a web site loved by millions of children. Read it on the BBC Internet blog - SB.

Relaunching a children's website is a surprisingly perilous business. A relaunch, which is normally accompanied by a large amount of promotion and razzmatazz, often brings a huge spike in traffic to certain areas of the site, in particular to any place where you are able to complain.

To give you a sample, when the CBeebies website was relaunched in 2007, the message boards, also here, were hit by comments like...

Read the rest of Phil's blog post and leave a comment, on the BBC Internet blog...

A new look for the BBC's digital services

2010-02-17T11:46:34+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/1997.jpg
Over at the BBC Internet blog both the blog's editor, Paul Murphy, and Seetha Kumar - Director of Future Media & Technology - have been posting about the BBC Online Suppliers Design Expo. Meanwhile, Bronwyn Van Der Merwe, the Head of BBC Design and User Experience has written comprehensively about a visual redesign of the BBC's digital services.

It's a fascinating insight into the creative proces that goes into rolling out a new look for the BBC online presence, as well as revealing that not only has the BBC Design and User Experience department been working with the legend who was art director of the Face in its peak years but that even way back in 1997 About The BBC was an integral part of the Corporation's web offering! (see pic above)

To read the posts and comment visit the BBC Internet blog