BBC News Channel Presentation - 21/03/16 onwards

Reith doesn't work in the same way Gill does for the blocks, especially with public perception and mindshare for the BBC. It has become ingrained in that respect.

As for the main channels, I'd bet on seeing One, Two and Four getting entirely new logos. Just not with Reith of course, but similar to what they have done not just in recent years. The BBC did have a consistency problem with their logos (the reason why the current blocks came about), but the rest of their presentation elements in the 90s were fairly consistent. It's probably the direction they're taking with the rollout of Reith.

I've tried Reith in the blocks, it doesn't work

To be fair, you’d probably say the same if it was Gill Sans being introduced. I don’t think that particularly looks right in the blocks too - it’s just what we're used to.

Gill Sans being Geometric in design, is designed to work within geometric areas, at the core of the lettershapes. I think that helps, but Reith is more of a Humanist/Grotesk font.

Gill Sans is a Humanist typeface. It's been the inspiration for countless Humanist typefaces, and was developed from Johnston, the first Humanist typeface.

Futura is the quintessential Geometric typeface.

I would agree with that, it is a Geometric Humanist hybrid. Inspired by Johnston Sans designed by his tutor, Edward Johnston for London Transport. But Eric Gill had disagreements on how letters should be drawn, and he stuck a little more rigidly to the Roman standard for uppercase lettering, which is based on the Geometric grid and shapes.

Which is all well and good, but the difference in practice (within the blocks) isn't huge.

Classification issues aside, I think the example you've given above doesn't put Reith in the best light.

Firstly, they're far from the best renderings possible. Shrunk down by the forum makes it worse.

Secondly, the weight chosen for NEWS is far too heavy, making the BBC lettering look anaemic next to it.

Thirdly, the unstacked versions of the logos have the lettering too large in both examples- doing as is (or should be) done now, and having the height of the text the same as the letters in the blocks looks far better, I find.

The BBC lettering was customised in weight (and shape, I recall), so I would suggest that the same may well apply in this case, were it to ever happen.

I made that image when the BBC Sport rebrand was announced. But either way, just using Reith in the blocks will not work without re-drawing the letter shapes. In my opinion, its not worth the effort to change it. The Logo is seen as a self contained item, no longer striped with text to create logos.

Also Eric Gill sculpted parts of Broadcasting House, so keeping the Gill Sans based lettering is a tie to the history too.

I am not keen on the BBC News logo using Reith in the way I demonstrated, but I was just using the Sport logo as a guide to demonstrate how it could look.

Though I disagree that it doesn't work, I do agree that there's no real need to change it.

BBC News is suddenly having some technical problems with its weather and playing some videos. No ticker neither.

When I did the logo ideas before, I only had the regular and bold versions of the font, so couldn't try out other weights. Having it in regular could be done (With the first image I imagined a consistent design, all following sport.)



But they may decide to go all in with the serif font, and do something like this...

The middle serif version definitely works, in fact I think I like the serif version of Reith more that sans-serif.