[BBI45]

I'll get the praise out of the way. The new Breakfast/Sport studio looks really nice. A long overdue change for Breakfast, and a nice refresh for the sports bulletins. I'm also a fan of the new graphics for BBC Sport. I've never been a massive fan of yellow, but the various shades mixed with cyan elements looks really good.

Now onto the negatives, which can pretty much be summed up in one word. Why? Since the merger, there's been various problems with the graphics, notably how they've been utilised. Whether that be the reduction of the strap from a useful source of background information to a bare bones indicator to the topic at hand, or the flipper either being completely non-functional, or only containing three stories at any one time. What has been done to fix this? Completely removing the flipper? Reducing the strap size to make better use of screen space?

Neither. All they've done is change some colours to make it so that every story looks like breaking news, thus making it looks like every story is a breaking story. I don't like to be this negative, because there are people who will have worked on these graphics and are presumably trying their best in less than ideal circumstances, but if you can't fix something that is broken, then just leave it. My design skills aren't the best, but I'm fairly sure I could produce an updated version of the graphics that better fit the (seemingly minimal) requirements for the news channel within a day. I do have to ask at this point, who is signing off on all this? Because it feels like there's no care anymore, and it's just embarrassing now.

And just as I'm about to post, they've gone back to the grey strap, but presumably just for World Business Report...