Yesterday, I wrote about Flemish broadcaster VRT and the restyling of their news and current affairds programmes.
Interestingly VRT's main rival VTM has also restyled its news about a month ago. Its restyling was not done inhouse, but by French broadcasting design bureau Gédéon.
They've been supplying VTM with a new look on and off now for the past few years. And they also went for a circular news set with virtual reality elements (both channels work extensively with vizrt). But unlike VRT, they chose for a complete overhaul in their colour scheme. Since 2006 their main colour was bright orange (often with accents of red). Now, they're going for a more aggressive black, red and blue, with white, bold lettering.
I really like the intro, how the set comes to life, the big world map being sonar'ed in. They then use a motorized camera travelling in an arc around the newsdesk, whilst virtual glass panels fly around the center. At the head-on point the intro moves into the headlines, which are given full screen. The final two headlines are shown in a shot of a video wall, which is a transition back to the news studio, where the camera zooms out and brings it all back to the news desk. In general, the intro has a very good flow and looks very international.
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| It may look fine here, but imagine looking at this on your 42" LED TV! |
Unfortunately they decided to go with even bigger and fatter fonts than their previous look, so watching that on an HD screen, it just looks grotesque. The idea behind this is, as they're trying to push the mobile video app, having the bigger fonts on the small screen increases legibility. For me it really is too in-your-face. If they toned it down a notch or two on the fonts, it would be more balanced, and not look so tabloid-like.
While I think news needs to be updated and rethought once in a while, VTM seems to have taken this to the extreme, as their previous restyle was barely two years old.
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