Basically, this looks like a package we might have seen here in the old Mocks forum on MediaSpy, and would have said “yeah, good job”. To be rolled out by the national broadcaster with SO MANY glaring oversights - not good enough.
As someone said - it’s attempting to have that “clean and simplified look”, but just misses the mark and looks a bit cheap. Really, quite typical of the ABC. However, in this case, nothing to do with resources, and all to do with LACK OF DESIGN.
It all looks and feels like the first pass, before it has been worked on and tweaked and perfected for 6 months - only - this is the final product.
Certain things I like - the blue animations, the opening titles, the new clean logo. And I am all for a bold, modern, fresh, 2D minimalist look for ABC News.
But this just hasn’t been executed well. It’s al been thrown together in a piecemeal fashion.
No one has stood back and gone - “okay, how doe this tie together on air. How do the sets work with opening titles…with on screen information”
It’s just a big miss for me - I was so hopeful. If ABC is serious about appealing to younger people - and being platform agnostic - they need to loosen up a bit overall. The fresh clean GFX seem at odds with presenting styles and reporting styles. You can’t read these GFX on a big screen TV let alone mobile devices.
And there is no innovation here. News Breakfast should a weather flipper at the least. ABC has gone on and on about news through Facebook, Instraram, mobile devices - twitter - yet this is absent on air. Why not include these things on the bugs through tidy, neat subtle animations - continually pushing the fact that ABC News is everywhere.
And the execution just isn’t that great. There are literally dozens of news channels in Europe that have similar clean modern 2D looks that are much better than this - and seem to really work together with sets, graphics, etc. There are cable channels in the US like Bravo and USA that pull of the 2D minimalist look better than this. It’s just an okay effort.
Good for Australia - I guess - but hardly world standard. And considering they’ve been working on this 12 months and it was all designed in Europe - I’m not sure why i can’t be world leading.
And the biggest thing of all - they have probably created 200 individual new graphic elements. And produced them all in SD. In 2017. Ridiculous. Guess it goes with their SD studios they just spend $80m on upgrading.
So brand new studios,m brand new graphics - all produced in SD.
Ok I’m confused with the whole SD, HD thing, because I am pretty sure most of the channels in NZ broadcast in HD, so why does a Nation a bit more advanced with television if you like, have SD and HD services? I might be wrong but the last time I checked there is no TVNZ 1 HD, so why is there a ABC HD or 9 HD? I may just be absolutely wrong here, but why?
I think NZ waited longer and went with a format called MPEG4 but Australia was well down the track of MPEG2 by then and not all hardware supports MP4 in Australia. Using MPEG4 allows to fit in more and more HD services.
Pretty much. We adopted MPEG2 in the early 2000s
Up until early last year, most of the main channels were SD only. GEM, 7mate, and One were all HD but Nine, Seven and Ten weren’t.
So networks, in all their characteristic wisdom, cut corners and didn’t think they’d need to upgrade equipment to HD for over six years. The problem with HD is that every link in the chain must be HD-capable for the product to be HD at all; if one link in a very long chain is SD, something won’t look right. So as it stands, the new graphics are probably designed for HD, and the studio cameras they use are most likely capable of capturing HD, but because suddenly networks have to find $$$ to fix a few links in the chain, they’re either slowly upgrading or putting off the expense.
And to answer why we have both HD and SD services, it’s because we adopted digital (and HD) very, very early in comparison to NZ. We adopted it so early that we have set top boxes (STBs) still floating around using archaic standards. Converting all of our channels to HD would either mean removing a number of channels and broadcasting in these older formats, or broadcasting HD in these newer formats but locking potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions from receiving television; these people are more likely to be older and poorer, so it doesn’t pass the pub test.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the resolution of the new ABC graphics. We have had plenty of opportunity to see upscaled SD on an HD channel and it can generally look quite good. The resolution of the current graphics quality looks worse than the previous did. It seems to be more than a missing element in a chain. These graphics are seriously flawed.
Compare the current with the previous.
That is concerning, I hope they do fix it.
You’re right that there has been an obvious downgrade.
The quality is horrid! It’s like they have the wrong field order applied to them. The output of them is seriously flawed and should be looked at immediately.
Right, Thanks for that.
BDA Creative updated their website with more shots of the relaunch:
http://www.bdacreative.com/en/node-550fff5399815/abc-news-rebrand-2017.html
It has shots of a non-squished clock:
Looks much nicer on the website! I haven’t seen much of the relaunch, ABC in the central West has been all fuzzy and static for nearly 2 days
On another note, the ABC’s homepage can be viewed ‘retro’. The feature is launched in order to mark 20 years since the beginning of ABC Online.
Wow. One of the first websites I ever visited as a kid.
The ABC News Early Edition opener today was using yesterday’s images. They didn’t bother to update it.
Video
Welcome. 
The graphics on TV are ugly, but on bda creatives website, they look, well, um sexy! They look really nice, simple and modern. They also look a bit bigger, so maybe the resolution and ratios are all wrong making them look ugly?
Caps from www.bdacreative.com
Website versions look much better. I feel like they have been setup incorrectly. Thy are blurry and as you said sizes are all over the place,
