[LDN]

Focus on Africa: 
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The Context:
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Verified Live:
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News Now:
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The Daily Global:
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BBC World News America: 
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So. 

This really is the new BBC News brand identity, in all its mediocrity. Absolutely nothing but endless sh!tty variations of red circles, and a complete lack of imagination. 

We have the Focus on Africa titles, completely lacking the warmth and character of the previous title sequence, featuring a bizarre iconographic representation of the continent that takes huge geographical liberties to try and make a sort-of-not-really-circularish shape, and which for some reason always makes me think of Acorn Computers. Then we have The Context's titles, which well and truly scrapes the barrel with its utterly facile motion graphics. Could it get any worse than that? 

Yes! Of course it can! Enter the pitiful 1990s-screensaver Verified Live titles; or the ridiculous 'swipe left to refresh' News Now titles, featuring a blurry TV gallery background that means nothing to anyone outside of this forum; or the 'Whatever Corp' flaccid PowerPoint presentation style of The Daily Global's titles... Every single one of them looks like a painfully basic free animation template that someone downloaded from some shady website.

With such a low bar, it's perhaps unsurprising to see some people looking at the new BBC World News America title sequence as an 'improvement'. And yes, indeed, it is better than what we've seen previously. In fact, you can literally see the learning curve of an inexperienced designer discovering and learning new techniques, such as intersecting circles and recolouring individual segments, or the witchcraft of masking tools, and then applying their learnings to their latest title sequence with gusto. I went through the same thing when I was a teenager getting to grips with the Macromedia software suite, and these title sequences are at pretty much the same level as where I was 20 years ago. 

I simply cannot grasp how this pitiful collection of sad, weak animations, loosely held together by nothing more than the mood-board buzzwords of 'red' and 'circles', was approved by any senior designer or manager to be the on-screen brand identity representing one of the world's most respected news organisations. 

And it's only made worse by the lazy re-use of 'generic' bulletin theme music on three of the new title sequences, and the ongoing mismatch of styles between the various BBC News channel programmes, and the National bulletins, the Nations, and Regions -- all of which are also BBC News programmes. The Nations have -- relatively recently -- been given updated title sequences with the older white-background-cats-cradle-globe style (as have the 1, 6, and 10, with the updated BBC Chameleon layout)... and that means those title sequences aren't going anywhere for a long time.

And so, as a result of this brilliant and inspired brand refresh -- for which actual designers and managers at the BBC, paid considerable amounts of real money, will have heartily congratulated themselves and each other -- there are now three completely different design styles for BBC News: 

1) the new anything-goes red-circles-in-literally-whatever-configuration titles, as seen in the GIFs above; 

2) the cats cradle style, recently refreshed for the 1, 6, and 10... 
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...and for the Nations... 
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...and 3) the regions, which have their own style with curved/scrolling placenames: 
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And let's not forget that BBC News managerial f**kery also resulted in new titles originally being commissioned for the Breakfast refresh earlier this year with BBC News branding... 
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...before BBC News management decided at the last minute that it wouldn't actually be a BBC News programme after all -- a decision that required new titles to be commissioned, so that BBC Breakfast could have its own blue (!!) circle lazily drifting across the screen in another enchantingly piss-poor animation: 
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I mean... FFS, there is no rational thinking here; nothing more than arbitrary decisions being made with no expertise to support those choices. There is no evidence of a coherent plan, nor of any design or brand experience or expert knowledge, behind the branding and presentation changes that have been made -- not just to the titles, but also the stupid changes to the lower-thirds, and the f**kery with the flipper/ticker. 

On that point, it's notable that the ticker has quietly been brought back to life in recent weeks, despite the all-knowing and unquestionable assertions of a BBC manager on Newswatch that viewers didn't want it because they couldn't read it on their phones. And let's also remember that the functionality of the second line of the old lower-thirds has been restored too -- the static one-big-headline-on-screen-for-5-minutes-at-a-time, which was useful to precisely nobody, has since given way to a scrolling rotation of large one-line headlines, essentially resurrecting the functionality of the second line of the old L3s. 

Between that and the ticker U-turn, it's about as close as we'll ever get to the BBC acknowledging that its idiotic, inexplicable changes to the L3s were as completely pointless as they first appeared, and that they should never have been made in the first place. Like every other BBC News branding decision over the past 18 months, the changes to the L3s made no sense at the time, or any time; indeed, like every other recent presentation tweak, they looked like nothing more than the product of decisions made by people who simply wanted to make changes so they could point to changes they had made (*COUGH* Lorraine Heggessey BBC One *COUGH COUGH*).

So, that's where we are right now. A brand identity system for a world-class newsgather and newscaster, cobbled together around the flimsiest and saddest of concepts, and bolted onto existing branding elements, along with random and unnecessary design changes made at the inexpert whims of those now in charge. 

This isn't a brand identity. It's a f**king shambles.