Introduction of the 1987 BBC logo

One more thing, despite the current BBC logo being created in 1996, (going by copyright notices), what were the reasons it took until October 1997 to first appear?

I know the new logo was first unveiled in the Design Week issue for June 1997, (if someone can find a scan of that, I'd greatly appreciate it), however, books and video tapes released in October were the last to carry the old logo, while magazines had the new logo.

Makes me wonder how early the new branding was edging in behind the scenes.

Books tend to be confirmed and/or planned anywhere up to 2 years before they end up on the shelves at Waterstones/WH Smith, though the actual printing from a manuscript itself can take up to three months plus all the other faffing around before you get to that point which can be another six weeks on top. You spend more time writing the damn thing than it takes to get it into Waterstones...

Magazines are similar but can be knocked out quicker, and they tend to have massive print runs, which takes time to do, plus of course the entire content creation process, writing the articles, designing it, doing everything else... and its why you can write to a magazine's 125th edition and have your letter published in edition 126, if you're quick enough.

Video label is just an extension of professional printing, can be knocked out relatively quickly. Would probably take more time to make the sub masters and duplicate from it than anything else, after all the BBC got burnt when they released a Dr Who video that had issues, so they had to change the way those were done.

The worst case scenario I've seen is on EastEnders autographs, not only using a logo that went out of service in 1975, but also didn't get updated until the 1997 corporate rebrand!

I sense a pattern here

Since I've just come across it, here's another occasion on which Playdays strayed from the guidelines, in 1996:



No 1972 logo on this occasion - indeed, the copyright strap is perfectly fine. However, "BBC TV" in the same Futura Medium font as everything else bar the strap, instead of the large form of the underlined logo...

(The alignment of the wavy underline looks off, too.)

It's certainly true that, pre-October '97, indies strayed from the guidelines more often than not. As we've now seen, Cynthia Felgate's company did it on at least three occasions, two of which came after the guidelines were revised in '92 (the '95 one being a real treat). What other indies were particularly notable for this?

One that wasn't was Grundy, which usually *did* keep to the guidelines while having to use *two* copyright straps on Going for Gold and the like (as it held the worldwide copyright while the Beeb held the UK copyright):

I think that two companies holding the copyright has something to do with why several episodes went missing- both the BBC and Grundy thought the other was keeping copies of all the episodes. They weren't.

Can someone explain how this mess of a logo made it on air?

It always looked that bad on air, even when it wasn't unnecessarily distorted.

Obviously someone thought that having an italic font to match the 17 degree slant of your logo rhomboids seemed OK - but only if you were using a controlled substance at the time.

Some people complained at Lambie-Nairn getting paid money to 'straighten the logo'; but it was required to allow for a new uniformed multi-media brand, and they have been proved to be correct. I can't think of any reason why the BBC would ever bother changing it.

That former logo looked extremely dodgy on TVs, and would have been dreadful on low resolution web pages of the late 90s/early 2000s.

To be fair, all graphics looked a bit shonky on the web pages of the mid 90s.

I remember an interview/lecture by M L-N during which he states a rival design firm was proposing to tilt the logo even further. Can only imagine that would have been a colossal waste of time and resources.

Agreed.

....huh.

No kidding. No anti-aliasing.


This is how the logo looked on the next three versions of the website.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961221203254/http://www0.bbc.co.uk/


https://web.archive.org/web/19970721215747/http://www0.bbc.co.uk/



https://web.archive.org/web/19971009000320/http://www.bbc.co.uk/



The new logo definitely worked better online. Though note how they sloppily covered up the background when replacing the smaller logo.