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February 22, 2010
Why would you want to work at the beeb?
Look around your office, now imagine being a part of this massive redesign
We set out to broaden our ambitions; to create a design philosophy and world-class design standards that all designers across the business could adhere to. We wanted to find the soul of the BBC. We wanted something distinctive and recognisable; we wanted drama. We knew whatever we created needed to be truly cross-platform and that we needed to simplify our user journeys.
Together, over the last four months, we've spent countless hours and created countless iterations of designs, components, mastheads, footers, polar maps, word documents, pdfs and grids... and whilst it's still a work in progress, I'd like to share with you where we're at with both the design philosophy and the latest version of our global visual language styleguide.
Oh to have a license-payer's fee eh? Oh, to have a thinking space with a wall big enough to share and iterate over the big picture...
I'm glad Neville Brody is keeping busy and lovely stuff and top marks all around to the BBC but I'm reminded of a talk I just attended where Christian Crumlish made an interesting point:
Pattern libraries are more useful, more engaging and have a greater longevity in the enterprise than design guidelines.
I think his point is that most styleguides start becoming obsolete the moment you complete them. Clearly a large and complex design resource needs guidelines, but I think Christian felt that giving a team a system of patterns and the understanding of the user needs they satisfy was a bit like teaching a man to fish instead of handing him a tuna steak.
