Australia’s Channel Nine has unveiled new logo and identity. Basically, they removed the dots and stuck the 9 (otherwise unchanged) in a box. They also released some new idents and spruced up a few of their shows, including Today.
First, the good: when used well, the new logo is good, primarily for purposes of symmetry. Nine promos make good use of this, with the logo in the bottom middle, surrounded by orange bars (highly unoriginal, but I’ll get to that in a minute). Parts of the new Today are also good-looking, primarily the little weather section. The weather symbols (rain, sunny, etc.) look real hot and fit in well with the box theme, and the adjacent box with the town’s abbreviation and maximum temperature is also well designed.
It’s not all good. The idents are awful, trying to incorporate the ideas of serenity, freshness, and fun, and failing miserably at all three. Nine’s going for the orange-blue-white colour scheme which is so clichæd it’s not funny, and it’s currently claimed by Channel Ten anyway. Let’s come up with something original next time, shall we? The coloured bars on the station promos are also completely stolen from Channel Ten: the main orange bar with overlapping semi-transparent white bars moving within. And that’s just for their good promos; some use a different, lop-sided design, with blue bars, the blue-on-white logo, and many gaps in-between. This second design has a better colour scheme, but the gaps and alignment are nonsensical and detract heavily.
The design of the new Today show is a combination of individual components, few of which integrate well, failing to give an overall tone to the show. Unlike the weather updates, which look and function well, the weather map is truly abysmal. Too much space is taken up by the three squares, indicating the weather, max. temperature, and min. temperature, leaving no space for names of cities and making it harder to identify where you are.
This goes for a lot of their new look programs, including A Current Affair. Many of the components do mesh well, by virtue of the colour scheme, but the alignment messes it up.
Overall, some good points, but it could have been done better. Also, today was my birthday, but you didn’t come to my weblog to read about me.