Bonus material: Remaking the BBC (Patreon)

To make up for no WRFC last month, here's some stuff I've been making in my spare time just for the fun of it. It's a new look for the BBC, in a magical world where the Tories have been made illegal and the Corporation has a new lease of life as a socialised broadcaster. Bespoke idents, or more accurately vague ideas for them realised with my extremely limited equipment. Rendering BBC1 in particular crashed my machine at least once. Try and imagine the basic design ideas made by professionals on expensive equipment with lots of RAM, rather than a poxy little PC running Ubuntu.

Unnecessarily detailed commentaries in order of appearance:

- This is my new BBC logo! The current one is becoming increasingly dull. I acknowledge that the 1988 model had serious problems. Being italicised before television screens could handle diagonals, for a start, and then there was the terrible choice of font-  short and fat with tiny apertures in the B, reducing it to an unrecognisable set of blobs at the kind of font size used at the end of credits, particularly on 625-line TV sets. But I missed the dynamism of the lurching parallelograms as compared with the staid and stationary squares. I also missed the colours. So I figured a way to bring them back without italicising the letters. At first I tried straight letters in 1988-style parallelograms, but that just looked like setting them in diamonds. Instead I decided to make motion into an informed attribute by slicing off the corner of an oblong and using the resultant spike in place of the old 1988 coloured lines, which also got lost at smaller resolutions. Doing that creates a sort of slat shape in negative space, and can be used in multiple configurations depending on the situation. This video here is the equivalent of the old red-blue-green logo animation from the early nineties, only hopefully slightly less ominous. The music, and indeed all the music here, is entirely in the service a placeholder, and comes from Kevin Mcleod's freeware tune database at Incompetech.com. "Post TLC" is a Fall reference. Look it up yourself. The font here and throughout is "London Tube", a bespoke version of the Johnston typeface, although they'd probably insist on Reith Sans. Which is fine.

- BBC1 gets by far the most attention here, largely because it needs it. The ident needs the use a certain amount of imagination to actually work the way I want it to. The way I see it, there's a bit of Britain's Outstanding Natural Beauty, and then a sort of frosted glass window with a framed hole in the middle closes up over it. The frame glows a little as the globe and the 1 fade up (and the BBC logo appears). To a tune along the lines of the 1998 BBC1 theme, hence its use here. This is the closest I could get, but hopefully the general idea of the logo and identity come through. It's very, very hard to design a figure 1 that looks interesting and distinctive and flexible in its own right, as Martin Lambie-Nairn did in 1991, but I was determined to use a numeral and not the word "One" so I had to manage it somehow. In the end I did it by incorporating the globe as seen here, slicing the corner off a rectangle to create a "1" which then fits snugly round the globe. I experimented a bit with the space between the 1 and the circle, and at one point was going to go with one where the 1 was attached perfectly, like a limb, until I realised it looked like the channel was BBC9. The point of using a numeral at all is that the channel hasn't had a symbol since the balloon, and that didn't have as much personality or flexibility as the fluted figure one, which could be turned into a hedge or a rollercoaster or a weathervane or even a flyover. I don't know if I've achieved anything similar with this rounded version, but like I say it's really hard.

- Yes, I'd bring back the clock. The thing about making an ident for BBC1 is that you have to make something that can appropriately introduce Eastenders, Mrs Brown's Boys, a Jane Austen adaptation, Killing Eve and the death of the Queen, and all with a single concept at the centre, one way or another. They didn't think of that when they created Oneness, as this plague has made obvious. My idents, I'd like to think, are flexible enough - there's room for all sorts of things behind the window, and when the news is on, or something really big happens, bring out the clock. It was dropped in the first place because of the transition to digital, meaning it would run either fast or slow for half the population, depending which technology it was synced to and being watched on. Now the transition's over, surely that's not an issue anymore? So bring it back, the Queen could die any minute and you'll be glad of it when she does. It's not much of a design really, but you get the idea. Also a first glimpse at BBC1's signature colour under my reign of terror: a sort of cobalt blue. I never thought red suited it.

- Here's how trailers would look. Maybe, I couldn't really decide.  Imagine the footage of Widemouth Bay is some ugly people yelling at each other in Eastenders or whatever. (The music is from the original video, I forgot to remove it). The version I was most happy with had the globe spinning in the corner before shrinking down as the blue title box (which is probably too big) zooms in with the details and the 1 fades in to complete the logo. In an ideal world these would be separated with grabbers starring the "1" from the logo, maybe in positions bringing it southeast of a circle or something round? Like a camera in a railway station swooping down the side of a bench whose edge happens to be the appropriate shape and is sitting beneath a clock? Does that make sense? These were made before the final version of the ident, so it uses a slightly different version of the logo. It might be better this way. I dunno.

- Here's an early evening programme menu, which is what we have these days in lieu of programme slides. Using the same basic design as the trailer endboard. Try and imagine an announcer. Also try and imagine the blue field doing something interesting as the programmes cycle through, because I couldn't think of anything achievable with my equipment.

- BBC2 is much easier, because I've applied the same principle as Lambie-Nairn and company when they reinvented the BBC in 1998 - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The Curve idents are excellent and also relatively young, so they're left more or less untouched except for the new livery. I have created a new wordmark for BBC2, though, adapted at the bottom here. The wave is part of it. This also uses the slats version of the BBC logo, although it probably covers too much space. I should have used the transparent one here and the slats one (in blue) on BBC1. Oh well.

- BBC3 isn't any kind of finished article, even to the extent any of the others are. Basically for BBC3 and 4 I have a logo and nothing else, but here's a sort of general feel for this channel. Imagine landscapes of white and magenta dots rising and falling and dancing onscreen while the 3 logo flashes on screen in various interesting ways, because I can't produce it myself. Ideally we'd take the basic ideas - the 3 logo, the signature colour magenta and the concept of dots - to various animation houses and artists, as they did to make the BBC curves or the ITV Creates logos.

- BBC4, ibid. The idea of this one is a massive version of the logo, which in an ideal world would be an actual physical prop, being lovingly examined in closeup by a roving camera as it constantly fades in and out of bokeh and a smaller version of the logo is overlaid tastefully. I don't know how much of that comes across.

I have ideas for other channels and services, but these were really hard on both RAM and CPU as it was and I wasn't even going to share them in the first place.