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New Fox Sports graphics (for real this time!)


Viper550

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Hi guys!

Here's what I know, and my best guesses.

 

Now, please take this all with a grain of salt, because I don't work at the lot, where these decisions were made, and have only really been implementing the new designs. I was NOT directly involved with the design process, but have asked some of the same questions you guys have, and this is what I was told by various people, along with my own speculation and assumptions/reasoning...

 

 

 

They definitely thought long and hard about where to place the FoxBox, for each of these sports. There are specific reasons for their placement (the placement is not arbitrary), but I haven't been privvy to all of those specific reasons, I can only make my own best assumptions.

 

However, if you think about it, it does make sense to have the Baseball FoxBox in the lower-left, because that leaves the rest of the screen clear, to be able to clearly show the batter when the camera is behind home plate, fly-balls coming down from the top of the screen into the outfielder's mitt, the position of the outfielders from the perspective of behind home plate, etc. Nothing much happens in the lower-left of the screen most of the time in Baseball. But a lot of action happens in the center-bottom, and the top two-thirds. You never want to have a graphic laying over the top of someone's head, either.

 

I was told the concept behind the new design was to make the entire graphics package feel more like an "app" - more functional than flashy. And to make it modular and efficient. The idea, I was told, was to not distract from the action, to be much more legible than the previous package was, and to use the space as efficiently as possible.

 

When you talk specifically about the pitcher/count bar, I would suspect that the reason they made it a separate piece from the main FoxBox was that they wanted to continue that simplification of the graphics package, to minimize any kind of "cluttered" feeling. Plus, it can disappear easily if it's a separate piece, whereas if you had the foxbox grow/change shape to incorporate it, that also significantly complicates the way the graphic is built. It can be done, but it makes it a lot more complicated and is a whole other concept than the modular concept that I think they were going for.

 

 

 

 

I didn't personally participate in any of the designs. I only implemented the elements for Fox Deportes, so I can't speak on behalf of the designers/Creative Director.

 

Personally, I do quite like the newest NFL Foxbox better than any previous NFL Foxbox/Bar design. It really is very efficient and well thought out in terms of minimizing the space the graphic takes up, while still showing the typical information that viewers have come to expect from a Foxbox, in a very readable and easily-understood way. Now that I've gotten used to it and thought about it, I think it's brilliant.

 

The new FOX NFL shield logo and Cleatus designs are interesting as well. I quite like them, personally. But I haven't inquired as to the origins of the changes/concepts.

 

Changing the font of the "NFL" letters to that particular block-serif font broadcasts (pardon the pun) that this is the NFL in particular. It just drives it home harder.

 

As you've probably also seen, both the FOX NFL and the FOX COLLEGE FOOTBALL logos have become shields this year, rather than blocks. I can't speak to why they changed to shields, other than guess that the NFL's logo is a shield, and they're what everyone thinks of when you say Football. A shield has become a symbol of the sport of Football. There are also lots of creative things you can do with a shield, including making Cleatus use it as an actual shield, as they've done in the past with the rectangular logo. I think it will be more successful with an actual shield-shaped logo.

 

As far as changing from "NFL ON FOX" to just "FOX NFL" - I can also only guess here, but when the Fox Soccer Channel rebranded to just "FOX SOCCER", they got a nice looking logo out of it. When Fox Soccer Channel went away and the soccer productions were folded into FS1 and FS2, the Creative Director wanted to keep "FOX SOCCER" as the branding for that sport (rather to change to a new logo and make it "SOCCER ON FOX"). They seem to be gradually changing to this format for all the sports: FOX [sPORT]. So, I suppose that's the legacy of Fox Soccer Channel?

 

For Cleatus, I think this new design gives the robot a new sense of energy, with all of that glowing power inside. He doesn't seem as "heavy" and metallic, he seems lighter and quicker. I don't get so much of a frictional "metal-on-metal" feeling from this new look. I think it just breathes new life into him.

 

 

 

 

I hear what you're saying in terms of the simplicity of this new package, but the concept was to make it more functional than flashy. To make legibility and functionality number one. If a graphic is unreadable, what's the point of having that graphic? Just lose it and show the video clean. It's just clutter at that point.

 

Our job as graphic designers is to present the graphics in the most clear/legible way, while still maintaining a sense of style and identity. I think this look achieves that. I think there is a lot of style here (albeit subtle). I like the detail of the glass borders, I like the detail of the nice subtle gradients, and in the way the logos and text animate into place. Little, subtle things, but nice things, that don't distract from the purpose of the graphic, and that maintain legibility.

 

I do like the NBA score bar. It works for the NBA, because most of the action is in the upper two-thirds of the screen for NBA games. There's also the fact that in the NBA, you get seven timeouts, and if you want to show that constantly, like is done in the NFL, you kind of have to have a long bar.

 

For Hockey, I'd say most of the action happens right in the middle of the screen, so you could have the bar up top or down below. But again, I think they're trying to be as efficient as possible and minimize the footprint of the graphics themselves. With hockey, it's not necessary to show much more than the two teams, their scores, the clock, the period, and the power play, and the power play comes/goes. If you can fit that into a graphic that has a smaller footprint, you should do that, if your goal is to be as efficient as possible. The power play can be a module because it comes/goes.

 

Anyway, like I said, please take all of this with a grain of salt. This is purely my perspective, with some insight I've had from working here. Hope this helps. Thanks!

 

 

Hey all, I'm new here but am very intrigued by this topic, so a brief introduction to provide context and explain where my opinions are coming from: I'm actually a composer from Central California, but by accident wound up getting into videography, which in my solo efforts has focused primarily on sports. To a small extent, we've filmed local sports events and sold them as "simulated broadcasts," with play-by-play, graphics, replays, and so on that I mostly designed myself, inspired by a whole lot of research and study I did of how the big networks do it. (I'm also working with some friends who actually work for local networks toward being able to live stream events at that same quality of production.) I also do a lot of scholarship recruiting videos for kids applying to college, and have also designed several graphics packages for those, though those are more closely inspired by several big networks, so much so that they're actually named for the city in which each network is stationed (Bristol, Stamford, Westwood, Soma, El Segundo). Especially in light of Billy's insider comments, I find it somewhat ironic that no less than a year after rolling out these network-inspired graphics packages for our SRVs, all the networks roll out redesigns (or at least redresses, as seems to be the case so far with NBC) that are all following similar trends—which may either make our SRV packages stand out better, or feel dated, I can't say yet—but I find it even more interesting that no less than a year after conceptually designing new graphics packages for our simulated broadcasts/hopeful eventual real broadcasts to address problems/concerns with those old designs, I also happened to also follow those same new trends before I even knew they were trends. It's the new paradigm, and I think in the long run, things will be better for it. I'll explain, keeping the matter framed around FOX's redesign so I don't go terribly off-topic.

 

The majority of previous graphics designs were, generally speaking, modeled in the spirit of functional, physical machines, both in terms of how they looked, with 3D extrusion, metallic or glassy textures, shadows, flares, glares, and so on, and in terms of how they functioned: for FOX and ESPN, "shelves" would open and close with information, for instance, or for NBC, where Troika actually posted that video demonstrating the physicality of the rotating cylinders of the old NFL score banner. In our own designs, that was done with the concept of a pill sliding onto the screen, from which all other panels (and/or "shelves," to keep the analogy) would slide out, almost like some sort of clown car or matryoshka doll of information. So it made me happy when Billy likened the redesign to an app, and mentioned the new modular concept, because I have always felt FOX came up with the most efficient in-game score bugs/banners out there—the new NFL FOX Box is my absolute favorite, ever, of any design, for any sport, I've ever seen—and I noticed the same things about their new design, and made mostly the same app analogy.

 

The new design that ESPN rolled out for those bowl games seems to echo that same sentiment of modularity. While nowhere near as efficient as even the new CFB FOX Box, stats were continually sliding out of that thing based on the context of the play at hand. In that regard, I'd say it was even more efficient than the old banner. As far as looks go, ESPN and NBC also very much killed the 3D machine concept in favor of something more app-like and functional (though obviously ESPN sent that message first with SportsCenter), and all three have near completely killed texture, toned down the extremeness of gradients, made text larger and/or lighter weight, and adjusted the proportions of text size, so it has a logical cognitive hierarchy (the score is larger than the team name is larger than game information or other contextual info that comes up). Back in our hood, when doing our redesign, I paralleled the change in concepts to Apple—called it the "iOS7ification" of our graphics—and focused mostly on eliminating anything skeumorphic in our look, and cutting down on unnecessarily used or cluttered screen space. We also settled on a rectangle in the lower right corner instead of a pill in the upper left, from which lowers would slide out and stats would slide up, but ultimately redressed it to look like floating panels. It hasn't made it to the building phase yet because before having to table it for other projects, I was still trying to cut down on real estate and try to find a way to make things more modular, so that one design concept can be used for all sports efficiently, which so far, hasn't proven successful. (Again, this was all before seeing FOX's or ESPN's new designs. The similarities simply stunned me.)

 

I know a lot of people complain about the blandness of FOX's new look, and I agree to an extent. To me, it feels like it's their own take on NBC's look, only not as elegant or eye-popping. I think I'd credit that to the less dramatic gradients and the smokiness, cloudiness, fogginess, whatever, of that glassy styling they went with—somehow, there's just less contrast between elements. (And for what it's worth, I'm rather disappointed that NBC is ditching that higher contrast and preference for light text on dark background.) But outside of the look itself, they've got some incredibly efficient new designs that present the information more clearly than ever before, they're using 16:9 to its fullest benefit now, on top of which, they've gotten the graphics smaller so they're even further out of the way of the game action… I don't know what more people could want. In fact, the only design concept I've seen that really bothers me is that for baseball, the two "lights"/dots for outs are cramping the count for space, when there appears to be enough room to stack them vertically and make the count larger.

 

Basically, it's my theory that at the dawn of the HD era, networks went the way of Michael Bay with their graphics simply to show off what could be done; now that we're firmly into the HD era and they don't seem so concerned about 4:3 compatibility anymore, it's about freeing up the screen and going for a clean elegance, since that's what's considered hip nowadays.

 

(**btw, I know it's actually "Fox," but have a long-running habitual joke of stylizing it "FOX" when discussing them on social media, in reference to the network's sense of flash and bombast, and only just now realized I carried that over into this post. Sorry to the aggrieved or annoyed.)

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It's now been a year since the original debut of these graphics; NASCAR got some changes tonight, with a new logo in line with the new NFL logo (even the network itself is calling it "FOX NASCAR" in the press releases!) and some new transitions/insert graphics.

 

Aside from that, not much else to report. They didn't try reinventing the wheel again like they did last year (RIP vertical leaderboard 2014-2014)

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It's now been a year since the original debut of these graphics; NASCAR got some changes tonight, with a new logo in line with the new NFL logo (even the network itself is calling it "FOX NASCAR" in the press releases!) and some new transitions/insert graphics

The NASCAR on Fox Twitter account changed its avatar to the new logo a few days before tonight's Sprint Unlimited.

 

"FOX MLB" can't be far behind.

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