Wives and Monarchs

The final version of Wednesday's Evening Standard had the front page headline "Queen in WAG Photos Storm". Apparently there is a huge row about the deal made by The Queen's grandson and his new wife with Hello magazine over photographs of their wedding. They are saying that it cheapens the monarchy to have HMQ displayed in pictures sold in such a commercial manner.

I say apparently, as I've not seen this "row" anywhere else. I can't help thinking that the Standard and the rest of the famously sleb-dependant Associated Newspapers group are more than a little bitter that they were not invited to the party.

The News is Dead, Long Live the News

BBC News have decided to update their branding again (see previous post too). While I can see there is a degree of continuity of design in the titles, I think this version looks a bit too busy and confused. I prefered the previous one.
On a more positive note, and long overdue is the rename of "BBC News 24" to just "BBC News" or, if you insist, the "BBC News Channel". It was always an unwealdy name and struck me as trying a bit too hard to ram its rolling-ness down your throat.
What's nice for branding titles geeks like me is they have posted a veritable wealth of variations:
Here, here, here, here, here and here.

RealPlayer: Buffering

This made me laugh.

Bong!

ITV1 did one the only sensible things they have done in a long time and resurrected News At Ten. It's the first time since 1999 that the bongs have been heard. Of course I'm approaching it from my geeky title-sequence and branding way so I have to say I'm impressed. The whooshing from space is back, the iconic music is back and in full.

Compare and contrast this from 1988:



with this from 2008:



Update:
To see a short clip on how ITN and MPC put the new title sequence together click here

All very much deja vu, but in a good way. It brings home just how much the London skyline has changes in just 20 years too.

It's just a shame that ITN still seems to be a shadow of its former self. The bulletin had an obvious effort put into it but ITN has dumbed down so much in the last 5 years or so that they have a large hill to re-climb.

Rebranding

If I were charged with rebranding a TV channel and particularly with rebranding UKTV:G2 this isn't necessarily what I would have come up with!

Brand Watch

Today BBC News updated their title graphics and music. It's all very similar to what they had before, and I'm sure that the only people to notice or care will be title branding geeks like me.

I like it. The new title sequence, across all the news bulletins, does seem to start with a rather disturbing nuclear accident in Turkey, but it does keep the theme of the last few years. So they keep their wooshing stream of "BBC NEWS" - an image with a sort of continuity going back to the rather more sedate graphic revolving around the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter in the 1950s.

Finally, they have seen sense and dropped the ridiculous two-word headline from the on-the-hour title sequence for News 24. It was tortuous seeng them try and reduce the headline to ten or 12 characters - invariably IRAQ BOMBS. Worse even than the old extremes of CEEFAX editors needing to fill the entire headline-row in teletext news stories.

News 24 have also decided, at long last, that they are actually offering a widescreen service. They have positioned their on-screen clock in a discrete position tucked right into the bottom-left corner. Before now they insisted in having it in the form of a large box set annoyingly far over from the bottom left corner. There, it always looked incredibly odd unless you happened to be watching a feed cropped to fit a 4:3 near-square style television where it actually would be in the corner. As it was it looked like someone had stuck a red post-it to the screen. That's all well and good until you realise that News 24 was a digital-only channel offered only in widescreen format. So why bother?

Petitioning

A little while ago I "signed" an electronic petition to request British copyright law be altered to reflect "fair use" now we live with digital technology as a regular and every-day experience:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

Today, unexpectedly, "we the undersigned" received a response:

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

The full report can be found here.

All good news as long as the recommendations are implemented and the recording industry lobby doesn't cause HM Government to wibble and dilute the response.

In the summaries I've read, I've not seen any explicit mentioning of DRM and its crippling of the ability to move legally bought digital possessions between various playing devices. The CD-player given above is all very well as an illustration, but the law if and when implemented should outlaw the restrictive practice of tying a player to a download-method. I want to be able to take my music collection with me if I change player brand, or if I decide to play it through my PC, laptop, mobile phone or anything in between and all at the same time.

Another welcome recommendation in the summary:

Recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers' rights.

There needs to be a sensible expiration limit and I can see no reason to extend the current one despite the whingeing of some aging rockers. I do think it should apply to other media, however.

This petition came at the same time as several others once this facility opened up on the Number 10 website. I'm hoping that others get a similarly considered response - especially the one asking Mr Blair to juggle with jelly.

Fame

Well - a little anyway. It seems my washing machine BBC1 ident has made it into the Media Guardian (under Tuesday's entry).

Yay me.

Logo Watch

This story caught my eye yesterday:

Sports giant Nike has paid £300,000 to Hackney council after it emblazoned the authority's logo on its products.

It's good to see a big corporation taken to task for this kind of action. The quote from Nike says that this was an error made in "good faith" but I can't help feeling that if the situation had been reversed Hackney would have been slapped with a monster lawsuit faster than you could say swoosh.

In other logo news this was revealed a few days ago. As far as design goes it's completely predictable, but then anything else would look silly when every other TfL logo is based on the familiar roundel design. I'm bound to be slightly excited about this, partly because I'm a complete design and typeface geek when it comes to the development of London Transport branding. More understandably, perhaps, it's because the new OVERGROUND line will be coming right past my house in 2010. It just makes the whole thing seem more real.