BBC News... in 2005

So, recently, I've been looking at past BBC News presentation, mainly from around 2005, and one thing that has never made much sense to me is why there was a lack of links in the BBC News brand between National News, the NC, and Local News. Whilst thinking about this, I decided I'd try something of my own that would tie the brands together better, for a consistent look across BBC News' output, rather like they have now. Except in 2005.

My main inspiration for this was the BBC London News branding from 2005, which was different from the rest of the English Regions, for a start. I've taken some cues from it, like the white diagonal bars, and the dark red background, but otherwise tried to be creative.

So far, I'm only satisfied with the English Region and Nation mock, and that's all I have to show you today. However, I hope to go the whole way at some point, and your comments and criticism will play a major role in helping me produce something good, there.

But anyway, here we go

Firstly, we have our English Region title screen, for Look East. Now, we've reintroduced a map of the region into the final shot, and also placenames, which slowly, and faintly, move in the background. You can also see the white bars, straight from London, and the positioning of the Name and BBC News box, which isn't all that dissimilar from what we have now. I've produced two variants - one with the placenames and one without, as with, I worry it looks cluttered, and without, I worry it's too plain.





And then we also have the title screen for our nation, and so here we have Reporting Scotland. Similar, to be consistent with the rest of the brand, but keeping that tinge of blue in there that Scotland have had for so very long.



And that is just about it for now. Comments are always appreciated, and hopefully I'll update this with more, should it not be rubbish.

Thanks.

A bit BBC NE? I don't like the placenames being that prominent, and a gradient from blue to red is never good.

Wow. I think that this is a really good mock and the simplicity of it is an important element. IMO the one with the Placenames is better as the Region sort of becomes part of the background on the plain background,

There have been far better BBC News mocks on this forum... this one unfortunately smacks of lazyness.

A good start! 3.5/5

Maybe some astons now?

The text needs something to blend in with in the background. It stands out far too much (and looks poorly rendered).

The plain Look East version looks like it took 5-10 minutes to make - add a gradient to a vector of the region nabbed from Wikipedia, the BBC News logo nabbed from Wikipedia, some diagonal rectangles, and Look East typed out.

The blue to red gradient on the Reporting Scotland version is very jarring - if you are going to combine blue and red, the blue needs to be lighter, and there needs to be a lot more white.

Looking back at your previous mocks, you seem to like simplicity in your designs. If you can spend time on subtle edits, that can polish up your mocks to something better. Even the best simple designs are, in many ways, complex. If you can do that, it's some way to making it decent.

I don't know what program you use for editing, but you might want to look at what settings you use for the text - make sure hinting is turned off (which I'm sure I was told myself many years ago when I was crapping out poor mocks onto here). If you're using Illustrator, make sure the output is art optimised.