BBC News
6pm & 10pm News Programme Design
Broadcast graphic & typographic templates for the BBC News Motion team to use for daily news outputs.
Background and context
BBC's 6pm and 10pm national news bulletins are watched by millions of viewers daily. With news stories breaking by the hour, and with so many viewers dependant on BBC to provide the latest domestic and international news, news teams are under very tight deadlines to deliver broadcast content on time.
There is a London based design team whose job it is to quickly produce all accompanying graphics for the BBC News studio video wall and tower, often having very limited time to produce the news story graphics. Despite this time restraint, the design team worked without basic typographic guides and templates to streamline their content production.
This project aimed to change that, by introducing a usable and scalable foundational typography guide and template system to improve consistency and workflow efficiencies.
My role and approach
My first role as Design Lead, was to win the team over with this standard 'design systems' approach. There were initial concerns within the team that templating would stifle creativity and essentially take work away from them. I presented the benefits of templating and laying down typography rules, promoting the fact that incorporating templates and design systems to speed up repetitive tasks, it will allow the team to focus on the real creative design work.
I then went on to create a foundational typographic guide to get the team thinking within a reusable template based system. The objective was to also minimise disruption their current workflow, whilst freeing up their time to focus on the more creative aspects of news graphics coverage.
As they are Motion Designers, Figma is not software they use in their day-to-day. They often plan their work in Illustrator and Photoshop, and use After-Effects to design and render the final motion file for broadcast.
However, with Figma's highly versatile plugin feature, a fellow colleague built a custom plugin, enabling typography set in Figma to be exported as perfectly rendered text layers in After Effects. This allows for future updates to be set in the Figma library, then seamlessly integrated into their workflow.
Outcome
With the rest of BBC News now using Figma for component libraries and design guides, it made sense to bring news broadcasting into the same eco-system.
Whilst it has been adopted by the design team, with one of the objectives being met - which was to free up design time to focus on richer story telling.
The typography templates have been in use since 2025. Progress has been evidently made to shift into a template-based workflow. As a freelancer who has since left the BBC, I cannot enforce the new ways of working. But as the team leans more into templated workflows, there needs to be persistent gatekeeping to maintain consistency.
Using an often over-looked weight in the 'BBC Reith Sans' font family, the X-bold typeface has slowly etched it's way into daily broadcast and long format digital storytelling.
Having studio tested several type treatments, this simple yet bold expression was the clear winner. Set above bold imagery on a solid block coloured background, sets a distinct and consistent style on camera.
I created a basic set of headings, sub headings, data sets, bullets and quotes, all type set by scale - allowing for consistency and freedom.
I then worked with a TV motion designer to set the animation transitions for the main article titles.
Below are some mock-ups. However, when you next watch the 6pm and 10pm news bulletins, you will see them in action.
