New Evening News logo
Viewers of the CBS Evening News are getting the first look at a new identity for CBS News. The design was done entirely in-house under the direction of CBS News’ executive creative director Bob Peterson. If you paid attention during election season, its strikingly similar to the package used during election coverage.
At first glance, I figured I was just looking at another typical graphics refresh, but this design stands out in particular with the introduction of a brilliantly marketable design element. The new look incorporates 3 interlocking globes and is used in several places throughout the package from OTS graphics to transitions and backgrounds. The globe element paired with the CBS eye device really grounds this look for CBS and is somewhat reminiscent of designs CBS has used in the past.
Overall, I see this package giving the Evening News a more ’worldly’ feel than the previous design (which I always thought was a little too Morning-esque). Its subdued color palette of muted blues & reds with a graphite base weighted against the richer use of 3D reflections finally departs from the trendy flares and glows we’ve gotten used to in the past few years.
My only gripe? The font choice. Just when I thought the days of seeing the ‘Futura’ font family in TV design finally go away, it’s made a come back! Although I never disliked it, It was never one of my favorites. Up until the late 90’s, news graphics were generally limited to the fonts that came pre-installed on our CG machines (and you can guess that Futura was one of them) so it was a little disappointing to see it reappear here, but I’ve always felt that the font choice in a package can make or break a look and so far, fonts aside, I’m very impressed with the work CBS and its design team have done.
Josh, about your thought bytes on CBS’ new background graphic for the “setting sun” news…
Basically, what they did was let some air out of the earth and rolled it across a flat plane and ended up with a flat map rendition of our spherical earth. Over the years the networks have run latitude and longitude lines across the TV plate glass until most Americans don’t know where Canada and Mexico are on the map. I grew up doing current events, maps, etc. in the classroom instead of today’s touchy feely discussions. My generation knew maps and not psychological mush. Most maps I see now on TV are like subliminal images, us viewers don’t have time to survey what we are looking at on the screen. I still can’t figure out why rain is green on the weather maps. Shouldn’t rain be blue and topography green? They got it right with snow (snow is white).
I stopped worrying about font’s years ago after people started and finally gave up uppercase “Old English” calligraphy and Bookman faces. Helvetica (now 52 years old) came to the rescue. CBS’ use of the horizontal ruled line came from the 1980’s. Someday grasshopper, when you are old and grey and being nursed and taken care of by tattooed & metal people, you will probably see a full circle of designs rearing their heads off the keyboards as well.
The $49,000 question (inflation factored in) for 2009 is this… how many years will the “HD” be a tag on everything on the RGB tube. I heard the bytes about “the change over” for so long on network TV, I feared it as much as the past bytes, “the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming”. Another one was “the ice age is coming, the ice age is coming”. In my day, communist, Marxist and dictators killed millions of people and now we buy from and shake their hands. Should we all get under school desks or just put on more sunscreen for protection?
Gp Millican
Bob Banks