Graphic Design Department at Yorkshire Television

I recognised the very distinctive controller from a retro gaming channel I'm subscribed to on YouTube - it looks like the controller for the Fairchild Channel F, also branded as the Adman Grandstand Video Entertainment Computer.

Have a look for yourself, and see what you think:

Watching this and then reading the "BBC Two rebrand development Update" thread makes me wonder if graphic designers in the 70s and 80s had to come up with the BS statements that seem to be an essential part of any graphics nowadays. Did the 10 dots between each letter of the First Tuesday logo represent the ten core values of the programme? Did the colours around Dusty Bin in the 3-2-1 titles represent the diverse yet universal appeal of the acts and prizes? Or did they just make stuff that looked good?



Good detective work. It seems that the game was called Pinball Wiz or Pinball Challenge and it was released in 1978 as cartridge number 17 for the Fairchild Channel F, which I had never heard of until today.

It can be seen here...
http://youtu.be/Wv7TlkaDmbY?t=11m05s

To me that's where graphic design has lost it's way. There's nothing wrong with symbolism and design intent, but now it's come to define graphic design to the point when something which is simply aesthetically pleasing to look it isn't good enough any more - there has to be some convoluted story about what it means to go with it or it's perceived to lack legitimacy.

I've yet to hear any reasonable explanation for things like the liquid gold ident to exist other than it just looked nice - which was enough of a reason back then, and still should be now.

Trying to over-analyse graphic design has driven us to the current drab world where almost all brands are just words written in a commonplace font (with or without the option of making minor alterations to weights or glyphs in order to then claim yet another minor variation of Arial or Trebuchet as a custom typeface) with a foreground and background colour and where a reasonable facsimile could be knocked up in Word in 30 seconds. There will doubtless be an accompanying dissertation explaining why the brand is the best thing since sliced bread (and to help justify it's insane price tag), but it doesn't alter the fact that it's boring and samey.

I agree 100%. Been saying this myself for a few years now.

The innards of 'BBC' computers we used as network capgens, were each taken out and mounted in a 1u enclosure together with a genlock card. It worked with the RGB signals which were then output to separate Pal encoders. It had to be done this way to ensure the resultant output signal was to broadcast spec. Bearing in mind these were used as sources to the ITV network you absolutely had to make sure the output spec was to broadcast standard because you never knew what kit was across the circuit, or at the far end which might take great exception on being fed with a non-broadcast spec signal, especially of course with regard to syncs/blanking etc.

The last point of this sums it up nicely. My employer (public sector) recently unveiled our new brand image; our logo is a crest, it's got our organisation name to the right of it - the new logo is just the organisation name written atop each other:

FIRST
SECOND LINE
THIRD

in Arial, but it's not Arial, it's OrganisationArial - the difference? A smaller dot above the lowercase 'I' and 'j'.

There's then the colour being ripped from the crest and making it flat and slapping it on plain blue backgrounds, this is now the brand image...

Pricetag: £106,000 of taxpayers' money.

The successor to the Archimedes, the RISC PC was used by many TV stations as the Omnibus automation systems ran on it. In fact when you reboot sequence/screens were very similar to those of the Archimedes and BBC computers, including 'Acorn DFS'.

The other legacy of Acorn is ARM, whose chips are in just everything these days

Although that doesn't mean that no other thought has to be put into a design.

It may look lovely but if gets unveiled in a blaze of glory before anyone realises that the public's connotation of the image is that it's a big spunking cock then you're in trouble!

Off-topic, apologies, but that sounds very similar to the treatment government departments are getting as a result of GOV.UK.

Probably "Acorn ADFS" on a RISC PC if you want to be accurate

Columbus and Omnibus running on RISC PCs was great - massively faster to reboot than Windows boxes.

I vaguely remember the RISC PCs appearing just as I was leaving school. Did they have the Operating System in ROM like the Archimedes models did? Always made booting pretty much instantaneous

Yes they do. Although you can add software modules which patch over the ROM and have to be loaded when it boots up.



15 seconds on the RISC PC I've got sat here