BBC Supplier Day
We – Toby and Charles – turned up like two good pennies at the BBC Online Design Day for independents and suppliers on Monday at the Centerpoint building in #thatlondon.
Although we don’t really think of Mudlark as a design agency, we were pleased – even thrilled – to be one of the 35 companies selected out of the 100 odd who applied. It was an interesting day meeting some of the UX team, the mobile strategy team, and seeing how childrens, learning and music seem to be leading the more traditional TV departments.
Toby is a designer manqué in any case and the sneak preview of the work they are doing with Neville Brody and other geniuses on the new BBC online presence – their Global Visual Language – visibly excited him. Words like “font” and “bleed” don’t do the same for me but it’s a shame we we were sworn to secrecy because it did all look lovely.On the other hand – it is all posted on Neville’s site.
This side of the BBC is so different from the television side I knew when I was there. It’s a general cultural thing , I suppose, with the digital people both more secure and excited about their futures and open to any numbers of explorations , including Mudlark’s extreme playability option.
So even without a cake-tree or a sweetie jar we attracted some really interesting BBC boffins to the Mudlark table and some great things may have been put into play.
—— Additional Notes ——
The new BBC look is a very interesting mature step in the right direction. There is a very insightful article here on the BBC’s website outlining how Neville Brody’s Research Studio crafted the new design.
It’s a great article because it goes into read depth about some of the decisions made and shows how difficult issues such a stext overlays on top of images were managed. The Guardian writes:
“According to the screenshots, the redesign – which is still a work in progress – will introduce a new visual style, moving away from the current widget-style nested design to a more seamless, contemporary look. In addition, it will replace the left-hand user guidance to introduce central navigation across the site.
The BBC’s head of design and user experience, Bronwyn van der Merwe, said in a a blogpost that the new conceptual design developed in the past four months would be applied to various properties such as BBC news, homepage, search, iPlayer, programme pages and even the embedded media player.
Released screenshots show a glimpse of a new visual language for the broadcaster. One of its most eye-catching elements is a deeper embedding of typography, picture and video. Picking up recent design trends, the BBC will, for example, introduce type over images, or use embedded video as the main picture.
Bronwyn van der Merwe said that the use of typography was an important focus while developing the global visual language (GLV) for the site: “A key feature of the new GVL is a much more dramatic use of typography.” As this video player shows, the change will allow the BBC to finally make the move from “multi media” to multimedia.
Furthermore, the BBC redesign also looks towards the integration of social media elements – “social bookmarking, share functionality, comments, ratings, reviews”. The new article page already integrates some of these elements in the right column.
The BBC will also move further away from Gil Sans, the fonts that the broadcaster adopted as a corporate typeface in 1997. “As well as Gill Sans we’ve introduced big bold type in Helvetica or Arial and restricted variations in size so that we have much greater consistency across the site,” writes van der Merwe.
The use of typography as a key feature in the BBC’s visual language development is partly due to the British graphic designer and typographer Neville Brody. His agency Research Studios helped the BBC design team to apply the BBC’s new design philosophy, described by the its own key terms modern British, current, authentic, compelling, distinctive, pioneering, joined-up, universal and best.
The BBC website’s approach is certainly influential in setting international trends in online design. The new navigation across the site was developed after a request from the BBC Trust two years ago for a more coherent user experience. One focus of the redesign was the aim to make the BBC website greater than the sum of its parts.
While there is no official date for the launch of the new pages, Pete Clifton, head of multimedia editorial development at BBC News, recently told students that it is a matter of months.”