BBC Radio Rebrand

I was inspired to have a look at what the BBC radio logos might look like, using the Reith font. I've made circular, square and bar versions for the main radio stations and I'm currently thinking about other stations too. I've even thought about a couple of the programme names.

Here are some more examples of other designs I've thought about.

This isn't all of them, but a selection. I really like the Women's Hour one, with the serif first letters and then the sans serif for the rest. I even made my own CBeebies bug.

They all look a bit... dull. There's no originality to any of them.

I think you're trying to to fit too much in a circle.

I noticed you missed out 1Xtra, any particular reason why?

It doesn't look pleasant to look at, there's too much information crammed into that circle and it looks misaligned.

My advice, having had two cracks at rebranding BBC Radio myself in this forum over the years, is don't bother.

I don't really see the point. The existing logos are fine, they have served well since 2007 and there doesn't seem to be a pressing need to change them. That said, this is the Gallery, so let's say the BBC did decide to rebrand radio for some reason, would they use this? Probably not.

The Sounds logo is wrong - Sounds has its own existing distinctive logo, and you've replaced it with a nondescript letter S in Reith.

The BBC local station logo is wrong - the FM frequencies are not promoted in that way any more, in any case the station has three frequencies (plus DAB) and not just 94.8FM, and if CWR takes up that much of the circle, what will you do when the time comes to rebrand BBC Hereford and Worcester or BBC Radio Northampton?

I can't read the "sports extra" in the 5 Live Sports Extra logo, too small. The "music" in the 6 Music logo harks back to the station's original logo, with the "m" inside the slanted 6 in inverted colours, but isn't done as well and struggles for readability. Woman's Hour looks a mess, the kerning is out between "W" and "o". The whole lot looks uninspiring and generic, plus poorly made.

I agree, there is too much going on especially for the 5 live logo.

Personally, I think Radio 1 and their extra counterpart (and maybe the local radios,) are of relevance. If I could, I would scrap most of the radios, keep Radio 1 and rebrand it as BBC radio, and merge most of the local radios to names like 'BBC Radio North West'

That is not the point however,
3/5

Five Live Sports Extra is too much of a mouthful.

They should rename the two stations "BBC Radio Five" and "BBC Radio Live"

BBC Radio Five One and BBC Radio Five Two.

Thank you for the comments. I'm no graphics designer and I'm not using professional software. I like to tinker in my spare time and just experiment. I was bored the other day and just wanted to experiment to see what the Reith font might look like if used to update the radio logos.

In my opinion, they don't look too bad, at least as a foundation to someone who's much better at this than me, to go in and add some personality to each one and also change the positioning of some of the elements.



The 6 music and 5 live sports extra ones, were the two I had the greatest challenge with and I will hold my hand up and say that they showed me that this concept doesn't really work with these longer titled stations. With the Woman's Hour version, I guess changing between the serif and sans serif fonts, won't help with the gap between the w and o. In terms of being , I'm using PowerPoint, not Photoshop, I am sorry.

This was just my interpretation and I'm sure the BBC would never use anything like this. This is something I have accused the BBC of doing, particularly with their programme websites. To be honest, I wanted to do something fancy with the Radio 3 logo, but with the software I was using, I just couldn't get the bass clef like they do in the current version. I kind of like them, but I can see that no one else does. It's fine though, I just wanted to see what other people might think.

Thanks for the constructive criticism.