BBC Local Radio branding tweak on the way

The branding of the BBC’s network of local radio stations is due to be updated – officially – imminently.

This exercise is mainly about the implementation of the BBC’s new masterbrand logo. The purple colour scheme is being retained. Other than the BBC blocks logo, the only noticeable change will be the capitalisation of the station name.

The updated branding was implemented on BBC Sounds some weeks ago. The new logos for some stations has been on display in images posted online in recent weeks too (e.g., mic covers, studio branding, outdoor marketing materials/signage).

Here’s how the English local radio stations looked on Twitter at lunchtime today:

As we can see, a couple of stations have jumped the gun and implemented the new branding in their profiles already: BBC Radio Northampton and BBC Radio WM.

A couple of stations have noticeably screwed up the base image used for the profile: BBC Radio Surrey (very large text) and BBC Radio Lincolnshire (wrong shade of purple).

There’s also quite a bit of variation in the size of the images (should be 400px x 400px for Twitter). The positioning of the white logo text also varies quite a bit – though this may in many cases be an attempt to optimise the text positioning within the circular format used on Twitter.

Hopefully remaining anomalies will be addressed in the latest branding update.

Still, not quite as bad as things were only a couple of years ago:

RELATED ARTICLE: BBC Radio branding in need of a tidy-up.

UPDATE: the changes were rolled out on 11th July and you can see examples of the new logos/branding in this article:

In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, new branding has already been implemented in some cases. Updated branding is expected to be rolled out for the remaining stations in the near future.