BBC Select to return as a brand

Absolutely knew this would happen... It was only a matter of time before those new blocks would show up again on another BBC identity. Either the people creating these identities have been misinformed of the current BBC brand guidelines, or they know something we don't and the BBC are indeed slowly releasing these new blocks with brands that are outside of the UK first.

Looks alright to me lads 🤷‍♂️

You'd think something as simple as just changing the font in a simple logo couldn't really go wrong. Never underestimate the BBC.

I really don't buy the suggestion that this is part of some master plan for a revised brand. At all.

1 - we have seen it used for 2 new products - both of which are international products from BBC Studios as far as I know. It has been seen nowhere else. Indeed the only other brand update which was done after BBC Select that I know of was BBC Studioworks - which seems to my eye to use a different version of the logo again (with Gill Sans but more padding inside the boxes).

2 - anyone with a gram of branding knowledge on a corporate scale knows that if you are going to change such an integral part of your brand, it needs to be noticeably different to what you already have otherwise you end up with lots of slightly different logos floating around and a diluted brand. Look at Morrisons - you had the black and yellow logo, then the slightly refreshed green and yellow logo, both of which lived side by side in half-hearted store refreshes. It was only once the current leaf-like branding came along we started seeing the brand properly updated across the portfolio.

3 - the BBC could not justify to the public/press expenditure on a huge rebrand politically right now, especially one with a logo so similar to it's current one. It just wouldn't fly.

I sure do hope this is true. It seems to me the most plausible explanation at this time and we will have to sit tight and hope further branding refreshes don't follow this same poor branding trajectory. As said, the correlation is that both of these logos are BBC Studios owned brands which in my mind are pretty far flung branches of the BBC. If more central brands in the UK begin to use this awfulness then I reckon we're in for trouble with the BBC's branding. Years and years of switching between Gill blocks and god-awful Reith blocks!

But as said, it wouldn't be the BBC's best interests right now to be rebranding it's corporate identity with something so subtly different. They introduced the Reith typeface in 2016 and I remember the typeface designers explicitly stating that a rebrand of the iconic logo was not in the plans. Obviously that's nearly 5 years ago now and things may have changed, but surely they would've introduced a logo redesign with the introduction of Reith in 2016 if they really wanted to do that? We've had many logo rebrands since then including News, Sport, Weather, Local Radio, Studios, Wales, Scotland etc. who have all used the masterbrand BBC blocks, just changing the division's typeface to a form of Reith.

Yes, I can't see this is part of any bigger plan. Just a lone designer who's created alternate versions for the international market. Isn't it just the two examples so far?

You only have to look at past examples - the BBC doesn't have enough checks in place to make sure things like this don't slip through. Or if they do slip through, that they're spotted quickly and fixed. Give it another 6 months and we might see corrected versions.

I’d say calling him or her a lone “designer” is being very generous. Even if it had used the correct blocks, that BBC Kids logo would still be shockingly poor. They may as well have just written Kids in Comic Sans

I meant it in the loosest sense of the word! 6 months was also rather optimistic.

I don't necessarily think that swapping out Gill for Reith would be a bad move, but speaking with my designer's hat on, it's not been executed very well. The current logo is carefully calibrated for optical balance, effectiveness at a full range of sizes and with subtle adjustments that make it work as well as it can. It might all seem a bit poncey, but I think it's one reason it's worked well for nearly 25 years. This new Reith version, while possibly sound conceptually, looks a bit rushed.

Though the worst thing, to be fair, is the horrible bevelling – it looks super naff, and smacks of 'throwing every effect at it to see what sticks'.

Alright seems a bit unambitious. Especially when it needn't look so "alright" and could actually look like it wasn't done by mistake:

If you're talking about the beveling on the composite image of the Select/Kids logos, that's a result of me doing it in a hurry on my phone and not being able to get it pixel-perfect.

But even that version of a Reithified logo, which is probably the best I've seen on here, is both too similar to the existing logo and still not as good as it - one of those reasons on its own would undermine the entire point of a rebrand, let alone both together. Even if the disease is spreading, I remain hugely sceptical that these bad blocks are part of some corporate rebrand.