BBC 3.0
Remember the brouhaha over BBC redesign last year? Apparently a lot of people are just not loving it. According to the Guardian article Website users give BBC News redesign grief (and anger, and bargaining…), “the responses sometimes look like the five stages of mourning.” A hefty 4,242 comments have been published in response to the well-intentioned posts in the past 16 days, most spitting feathers but some leaving questions yet to be answered.
Although BBC claimed it lived with and loved the distinctly ‘web 2.0’ design for a while now and it’s done them proud, it time to move on and before the end of last year they resurrect the redesign project.
BBC stated:
We set out to broaden our ambitions; to create a design philosophy and world-class design standards that all designers across the business could adhere to. We wanted to find the soul of the BBC. We wanted something distinctive and recognizable; we wanted drama. We knew whatever we created needed to be truly cross-platform and that we needed to simplify our user journeys.
This is where Neville Brody and his agency, Research Studios, comes in. have collaborated closely with the BBC to redesign their online Global Visual Language (GVL) and take the organization and its users into a more compelling digital space. At the heart of the project was the joint desire to bring joined-up cross platform concepts and experiences to users of bbc.co.uk and bbc.com now and into the future.
Here’s their recap:
After four months, countless hours and countless iterations of designs, components, mastheads, footers, polar maps, word documents, PDFs and grids…, this is the latest in BBC’s design philosophy and the latest version of their global visual language styleguide.
The team wanted to create a design philosophy, or a set of values, to unite the user experience practitioners across the business. They settled on nine keywords which we think sum up what we’re about and what they’re trying to achieve:
Modern British
We want to create a modern British design aesthetic, something vibrant and quirky that translates outside our national boundaries.Current
It needs to feel current and reflect what’s happening in the UK right now, in real-time. We curate a timeline of Britain and create links to the past – to our rich archive.Authentic
Wherever we are heard we need to sound authentic and relevant, warm and human. We want to reference the BBC’s iconic design and broadcasting heritage. We value the trust placed in us.Compelling
We engage our audiences with compelling storytelling. Our voice ranges from serious and authoritative through to witty and entertaining.Distinctive
We stand out from the crowd. We strike a balance between overly templated, cookie-cutter design and beautiful anarchy. We are bold and dramatic.Pioneering
We pioneer design innovations that surprise and delight. But we take our audiences with us.Joined-up
We view all services and platforms as one connected whole but deliver experiences that are sensitive to their context of use.Universal
Our services are open and accessible. Our interfaces are simple, useful and intuitive.Best
Our ambition is to be the best digital media brand in the world.
Armed with the new philosophy, they began creating conceptual designs for various properties: BBC news, homepage, search, iPlayer, program pages and the embedded media player.
Through doing this work we began to distill the essence of a new visual style. Here are some of the key elements, starting with the page grid.
The new grid is based on 31 sixteen pixel columns with two left hand columns that can be split into four, and one wider right hand column, which accommodates the ad formats that appear on the international facing version of the site.
They’re looking to create the effect of interwoven vertical and horizontal bands, making a feature of the right hand column across the site.
Along with the 16 pixel vertical grid they’ve also for the first time got an integrated 8 pixel baseline grid so that they can align elements on a page both vertically and horizontally.
A key feature of the new GVL is a much more dramatic use of typography. As well as Gill Sans they’ve introduced big bold type in Helvetica or Arial and restricted variations in size so that they have much greater consistency across the site.
They’ve developed a highlight colour palette for non-branded areas of the site, or areas where the BBC masterbrand talks directly to the audience (e.g. the BBC homepage, search, some of our genre areas). Each color has a tonal range to be used in contrast or in unison with each other.
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The redesign covers a lot of grounds. It goes to show you that it’s not just a “re-skin” as clients like to call site redesigns, which often times gets me going.
A website redesign is not just changing colors and moving things here and there; It’s analyzing the existing website and the interactive landscape, looking at comparable companies within and outside the industry, and exploring potential improvements based on best practices and audience expectation.
If you do it right: It’s not just a redesign. It’s a rebirth.
To read more: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services