Ben Gamblin Online - Blog: Times New Roman is very 1990's |
Times New Roman is very 1990's31 Mar '08, 21:48The BBC are undergoing a significant update of their news pages, probably for the first time since 2003, introducing new features to bring it more up-to-date with the internet of today.The overall layout of the style appears to be remaining the same, with a BBC banner at the top, navigation menu down the left, the main article in the centre and related links on the right. There's no arguement from me here. This is a tested format that appears to work well. However, the changes are quite obvious. The BBC are moving away from the archaic 800 pixel wide pages and increasing their width to accomodate screens at a resolution of 1024 pixels wide and above. Pictures are supossedly going to bigger although unless it's just me, I'm yet to notice this increase (I assume old pictures for old stories will remain the same). The site is more spaced out, which I think looks quite odd in the "Around the world now" section on the main page of news.bbc.co.uk but may look okay given time to adjust and video should be embedded into news pages which has been creeping in but as of today, I still experienced pop-up boxes with every video I tried to watch (maybe it's not for video only stories, but for those with an accompanying article?). One thing I don't like though (there had to be one eh?). I do wonder what it is that attracted the designers to the Times New Roman font. I'm sure it's not just me that thinks this looks terrible untidy and frankly out-of-date. I suppose it doesn't look so bad on the main article text on the front page, but the smaller the font gets, the worse it looks so the menus look untidy, and almost unfinished. I'm hopeing that's one thing that's still due to be corrected. I've just looked back at the site and noticed that there is now two different fonts in operation. What looks like Arial is used in the ticker at the top of the news page, just below the BBC banner. Ariel is also used at the very top of the page for the "Low Graphics" and "Accessibility" links which fits in nicely with the BBC's logo. Ariel is also used in the footer for the copyright date, disclaimer and links such as "About Us". It looks odd having the content of the page use this old fashioned font. I'll be interested to see how this pans out as they finish making changes. I'm hopeful for a very nice site fit for an internet that is many times faster than it was 5 years ago. I hear that BBC News 24 will be getting a new set on 21 April this year as well. P.S. This entry is dedicated to Charlie, who couldn't wait to find out what I thought of the site!
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