BBCi is no more! The BBC.co.uk homepage has ditched the BBCi identity in favour of what people outside the BBC peskily persisted in calling it, despite spending lots of funny money on marketing.

What a relief. One hilarious consquence of the BBCi branding was how often when I met people external to the corporation or where introduced at an event at first they thought I worked for BCCI, the disgraced financial institution.

So far good.

However the new logo isn’t, shall we say, “all that”.

I’ll lay odds it was designed by a corporate identity design agency, and looked great on a powerpoint or on a piece of foamcore; but it really doesn’t survive on the webpage. I’ll also lay odds that a designer or client-side coder inherited eps files from the bigshot agency and cursed them as they struggled to reduce it to the size on screen with out it looking too ratty at the edges.

Their hard work was in vain. There is no need for this vainglorious logo other than having given marketing managers something to nod sagely about for a couple of months and sign cheques.

It’s literally a waste of space, occupying prime real-estate with tatty nonsense that doesn’t tell you anything that the URL you’ve entered, or the nice discrete classic Lambie-Nairn designed BBC logo in the top-right hand corner, or for that matter the demoted-but-distinctive doesn’t already tell you.

Also, BBC – the design agency you hired haven’t ready the BBC’s corporate identity guidelines – or they have wilfully ignored them.

Lambie-Nairn’s guidelines state that the boxed-capitals of B, B and C are Solid Colour (black, white, green, whatever) with the letterforms “punched-out” from the solid colour, revealing through them whatever colour is behind (as in the top-right-hand-corner version). The letterforms are not meant to be white on colour as executed here.

Also – what are those psuedo-3D planes behind the BBC.co.uk doing on a site which has done so well in the last couple of years in reaching a lovely, consistent, graphically strong ‘2D’ aesthetic?

What the hell do they signify? What do they add?

It’s really a shockingly bad, sophomoric logo which should never have made the cut, even if it was deemed there was sufficient reason to retro-brand the site.

2/10.

Ah well. I’m sure the rage will subside and I’ll get used to it, like I did BBCi.