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WSB TV debuts a new open


Hickman360

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On 3/27/2019 at 6:54 PM, WWUpdate said:

Looks horrible. This country has so many great designers, yet TV news design has been, with rare exceptions (Tegna, etc.), wretchedly conservative for the better part of two decades. It's as if station managers don't want their product to look modern, elegant, and sophisticated. This is especially baffling since tech companies like Apple have proved that good design ultimately pays off. Graphics like this make TV news look like cheap video games.

 

This is how good TV news design (set, graphics, etc.) can be if you encourage designers to be inventive:

 

 

 

What is "inventive" about that? It's yellow and white boxes with black text inside of it. You can go into PowerPoint and re-create that look in less than 2 minutes. At least something like WSB's forces you to actually take the time to work, be detailed, think things through, and take your time. Nothing about this is "inventive" and certainly not "futuristic." Sure, it's clean and simple and not distracting, but it's hardly inventive.

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10 hours ago, MidwestTV said:

 

What is "inventive" about that? It's yellow and white boxes with black text inside of it. You can go into PowerPoint and re-create that look in less than 2 minutes. At least something like WSB's forces you to actually take the time to work, be detailed, think things through, and take your time. Nothing about this is "inventive" and certainly not "futuristic." Sure, it's clean and simple and not distracting, but it's hardly inventive.

 

Something doesn't need to be complicated to be inventive. A Picasso painting is much less complex than a Kincaid painting, but it's far more inventive. The very simple pyramid at the Louvre is inventive, as is the St. Louis Arch and the Sydney Opera.

 

Sometimes less really is more, and while you can recreate that look fairly quickly, it's very difficult to come up with it in the first place and make it work. Elegance and sophistication requires a lot of effort and ingenuity, even though the final product may seem simple at first glance. (When people look at modern art and say, "I could have done this," there is really once one response: "Why didn't you do it then, if you think it's so easy?")

 

The WSB open looks tacky, as if aimed at video game-playing teenagers. The France Info TV look is elegant and graceful -- in other words, it's designed for adults.

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And for all of its complexity, that WSB open looks pretty much like any local open within the past 20 years. It's boring and derivative. If someone wanted to parody a local newscast, she would probably come up with something like that. France Info TV's look, on the other hand, is unique. It's utterly original, which is what good design should always strive to be.

 

Being different is a plus in my book.

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WSB's on-air appearance has always been like wallpaper to me. Flashy but never in an interesting way... slick but not to the point of standing out. Even their set, for all the advancements added to it, doesn't look like it was built in the last 15 years. They do everything well enough but nothing really "wows" me or looks remotely contemporary about them.

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Design trends are a thing. Design has been trending flat for the better part of the last decade, pushed along by mobile devices and the web, and US TV has been following along. That's how you end up with things like the Tegna graphics package.

 

Europe has been ahead of the curve when it comes to TV for a while. Sky, the BBC, and many others have been flat (or near flat) for quite some time. I don't even think it's fair to call some of these graphics "packages", they're more like design systems. Fittingly, that's the region from which the International Style came from, which all this is really just a continuation of.

 

The problem with this open is that it looks extremely dated and old, even though it just launched. It does not follow modern design trends. I know there's a love affair with the mid-2000's graphics packages with absurd amounts of 3D on here, but, let's face it, they're cliche. TV graphics were glassy and shiny when everything else was glassy and shiny. Remember when smartphone and computer operating systems were all glassy? The shiny dock on early versions of Apple's OS X? That was the thing at the time. But then things started trending to flat, and we started seeing "hybrid" flat 3D design (which Hothaus did a great job on with packages like the first WBBM HD package) and now we're seeing totally flat design (Tegna and others.)

 

The open fits with the rest of their early 2010's "shiny everything" look, but what they really need to do is spend time updating the whole damn package. Lose that awful font and turn off a bunch of the junk littering the lower thirds.

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Lol that open was hilariously bad. Sure, one could argue it does the job "just fine" (which itself is a dodgy line of reasoning but w/e), but honestly speaking from a basic graphic design standpoint... it's a big yikes. Like, no wonder the intro already looks comically dated. WSB cliches aside, there's essentially zero or lacking in ambient lighting, contrast and narrative. You know, something you would find in a modern-day, or tolerable CGI intro...


Unfortunately, and evidently, it is stuff like this that validates @WWUpdate's sentiments on American news presentation. It's boring and derivative as hell.  😴

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It's not as if Cox can't do the flat-ish look. Look at WPXI or KIRO, who have decent flat intros (although WPXI offsets that with crummy production music). OTOH, just about EVERYTHING about WSB screams late 2000s, even though a lot of WSB's looks was updated in 2014 or 2015. Let's just hope that Terrier will update WSB into the 2020s the next time Channel 2 Action News gets a new set or new graphics.

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8 hours ago, NEOMatrix said:

It's not as if Cox can't do the flat-ish look. Look at WPXI or KIRO, who have decent flat intros (although WPXI offsets that with crummy production music). OTOH, just about EVERYTHING about WSB screams late 2000s, even though a lot of WSB's looks was updated in 2014 or 2015. Let's just hope that Terrier will update WSB into the 2020s the next time Channel 2 Action News gets a new set or new graphics.

 

To add on to this, I think WSB itself had the bones of a good, flat-ish package from 1998 to 2006.

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On 4/3/2019 at 12:03 PM, Weeters said:

Design trends are a thing. Design has been trending flat for the better part of the last decade, pushed along by mobile devices and the web, and US TV has been following along. That's how you end up with things like the Tegna graphics package.

 

Europe has been ahead of the curve when it comes to TV for a while. Sky, the BBC, and many others have been flat (or near flat) for quite some time. I don't even think it's fair to call some of these graphics "packages", they're more like design systems. Fittingly, that's the region from which the International Style came from, which all this is really just a continuation of.

 

The problem with this open is that it looks extremely dated and old, even though it just launched. It does not follow modern design trends. I know there's a love affair with the mid-2000's graphics packages with absurd amounts of 3D on here, but, let's face it, they're cliche. TV graphics were glassy and shiny when everything else was glassy and shiny. Remember when smartphone and computer operating systems were all glassy? The shiny dock on early versions of Apple's OS X? That was the thing at the time. But then things started trending to flat, and we started seeing "hybrid" flat 3D design (which Hothaus did a great job on with packages like the first WBBM HD package) and now we're seeing totally flat design (Tegna and others.)

 

The open fits with the rest of their early 2010's "shiny everything" look, but what they really need to do is spend time updating the whole damn package. Lose that awful font and turn off a bunch of the junk littering the lower thirds.

Like a couple others who posted on this thread, I'm not a big fan of flat design. But to me, it is Microsoft who pushed this trend of flat design.

 

How many websites don't look flat at this point? Clearly not as many as there once were, but there are still some. Wikipedia (the desktop site, not the mobile site) does not use flat design. What are some other examples of major companies still not using flat design on their websites?

 

I wish flat design isn't as common as it is right now, but it is and it probably will only get more common.

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1 hour ago, Conrad said:

Like a couple others who posted on this thread, I'm not a big fan of flat design. But to me, it is Microsoft who pushed this trend of flat design.

 

How many websites don't look flat at this point? Clearly not as many as there once were, but there are still some. Wikipedia (the desktop site, not the mobile site) does not use flat design. What are some other examples of major companies still not using flat design on their websites?

 

I wish flat design isn't as common as it is right now, but it is and it probably will only get more common.

Here’s an interesting video about the flat design.

 

 

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On 4/8/2019 at 7:05 PM, CLT-DCA-ORF-PTI said:

That explained everything EXTREMELY well. It now makes sense! I would've never put it all together. I just remember seeing the decline of 3D, never thought about the relation with Apple! 

 

I don’t know if it had anything to do with TV design but I thought it was interesting enough to share. 

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On 4/9/2019 at 10:45 PM, rkolsen said:

 

I don’t know if it had anything to do with TV design but I thought it was interesting enough to share. 

I would have credited the start of the trend to Google from the early 2010s when Android tablets and phones (subsequently) started to see a flat-design GUI update in then-recent versions of Android, but a quick glance in the comments says that's much thanks to Microsoft when they brought out the Zune in 2006. Either way, a good insight

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G3 definitely started the trend in broadcast.  What I wonder is if they would have designed the simple package had Gannett not expand by a decent amount (forget which stations they got around the time Belo maybe?). Something like that they could design and essentially work on any CG. 

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59 minutes ago, rkolsen said:

G3 definitely started the trend in broadcast.  What I wonder is if they would have designed the simple package had Gannett not expand by a decent amount (forget which stations they got around the time Belo maybe?). Something like that they could design and essentially work on any CG. 

 

The first G3 flat look was before Gannett split into two and before Gannett/Tegna started buying a ton of stations. The color palette was a tie-in with USA Today, which got its own brand redesign around the same time. It was a much smaller station group, and that look felt much more special when it wasn't on so many stations. I didn't like it as much once it rolled out to so many stations across the country all of the sudden. The current Tegna look at least has some personality and makes it easier to shoehorn in the awful logo of whatever station it is that Tegna bought in Shelbyville this week.

 

I will also add that while flat looks are particularly functional for broadcast, design trends reach all sectors. Everywhere, minimalism is in, whether that's in TV news graphics, user interfaces, fashion, product packaging, interior decorating, or whatever else. Whatever design trends that are at the forefront of popular culture will eventually end up everywhere.

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G3.0 predated the Belo acquisition by a year or two, and if I recall right weren't some stations still running on Deko systems?  (I know Belo was standardizing around Miranda CGs at the time they got acquired - did Gannett/Tegna roll them out to legacy Gannett and ex-London stations?)
 

In any event I still think G3.0/the USA Today package was the best example of that type of design.  Maybe not as "flat" or trendy as their current stuff, but it was absolutely easy on the eyes, easy to discern, and logical to follow.  The color-coding was genius, of course, but the thoughtful use of a grid-like design and grey/black hues made the whole thing distinctive.  It reminded me somewhat of a well-designed webpage.  Not the mess that Headline News had in the early 2000s, but if you're at all familiar with web design you can see the "grid" elements in there.

 

I do agree with C Block that the look lost some of its charm around the Belo acquisition - partly because it became too common and partly because they began watering it down somewhat.  I think the current graphical look is decent, distinctive, but I don't think it really "grabs" me on a pure design level as G3.0.  (Honestly I think the music saves the current look.)

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  • 3 weeks later...

"Here's the 5 day forecast with "the weekend always in view"."

 

d4b4031209870264.jpg 721ede1209870274.jpg e3a2541209870284.jpg 4fdb491209870294.jpg 2da6d11209870304.jpg 

 

🤔

The good thing is it's only a 5 day forecast with "the weekend always in view." Now they need new L3's and they might have something decent here.

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That's quite a departure from what they had.

 

Also, while this change is probably just a coincidence and nothing else will change, the previous weather graphics were introduced in mid-2009, a year before the rest of the news GFX changed in September 2010. A really slow rollout of a new graphics pack wouldn't be new ground for WSB.

 

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I really like the new weather graphics! Hopefully the OTS and lower thirds will follow suit sooner than later. They’re too stark a contrast with these newer graphics so I do believe they’re rolling out a new look piecemeal. 

 

Time will tell.

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I have to say that those weather graphics look familiar to me, but I can't exactly place where. They look pretty decent.

 

According to Brad Nitz, cooler days on the five day will be indicated by shades of blue.

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