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ibb.co  

ibb.co 

The decision to fully recolour all lower thirds in red on BBC News strikes me as bizarre for several reasons: 

[*]The full-red layout has been used for breaking news for years. Now, all news looks like breaking news -- and some viewers may well wonder why stories like "Putin: the beginning of the end?" or "Elton closes Glastonbury in style" are seemingly being flagged as breaking news. 
[*]How will breaking news stories be flagged or grab one's attention if breaking news looks like yesterday's news? 
[*]BBC News recently ditched the second line of text on the main super, in favour of a single large line of serif text. This was bad enough when the text was on a translucent black background, allowing some of the picture behind it to be seen. Now, that entire section of the screen is a fixed red box with that whole section of the screen more-or-less permanently obscured.
[*]The large-serif-headline configuration on the lower thirds was only ever intended to display the briefest of headlines (much like the graphics used during headlines summaries), alternating with the 'BREAKING' text. It was never meant to be used, as it is now, for descriptive summaries or detailed updates to a story, which is how we end up with this sort of mess: 

Making this whole area one flat expanse of red on a near-permanent basis only seems to call further attention to how poorly these graphics are now working. We either have one very large and very undescriptive headline on screen for several minutes, or we have a ridiculously small but more descriptive headline surrounded by an ocean of wasted space. And instead of actually improving the design to work with its new way of doing things, or even backtracking a little bit on its obsessive reduction of on-screen text, BBC News just decided to make the whole thing red. 
[*]There's a fairly unpleasant colour clash between BBC News red and the bright teal 'NICKY CAMPBELL' bug. But that's a matter of taste -- more significantly, what's going to happen with programmes like The Context and Focus on Africa, which have only recently received red programme name-bugs? Red on red? 


In my opinion, this is a change that improves nothing. It fully and permanently blocks out the bottom chunk of the screen; it calls greater attention to the idiotic decision to only display a headline on the lower thirds; and like almost every other aspect of recent BBC News design, it looks utterly basic (in every sense of the word) and thrown-together. I just don't see what problem this was supposed to solve, or why anyone would consider at an improvement in any sense. 

I could have lived with it if they'd stopped at turning the logo bar into a full red strip... 

...and left the translucent black background in place, instead of making everything all-red, all day. Frankly, that would have been just as pointless a change in my eyes, but I think it would have looked a lot more pleasant than the Great Wall of China Red that we're now stuck with.