# BBC new logo (2021)

> BBC launched a new logo in Oct 2021, designed by BBC in-house and Wolff Olins. Oct 20 2021: three-block logo redrawn: Gill Sans letters replaced by smaller BBC Reith, blocks spaced wider.

## Key facts

- Brand: BBC
- Launched: Oct 2021
- Studio: BBC in-house and Wolff Olins
- What changed: Oct 20 2021: three-block logo redrawn: Gill Sans letters replaced by smaller BBC Reith, blocks spaced wider.
- Why: The BBC refreshed its branding after audience research described some services as old fashioned and out of date, aiming to join up its different services.
- Industry: Media
- Logos: https://rebrandlog.com/logos/bbc-2021/before.svg (before), https://rebrandlog.com/logos/bbc-2021/after.svg (after)

## The rebrand, explained

The BBC had used its three-box logo with Gill Sans letters since 1997. In 2017 it commissioned its own typeface, BBC Reith, named after founding figure John Reith, but said at the time that the master logo would keep Gill Sans. On 20 October 2021 it went all in.

The new mark swaps Gill Sans for Reith, scales the letters down slightly so they sit better in their squares and spaces the blocks further apart. NewscastStudio compared it to ABC's careful redraw of its own long-running logo. The bigger change was the system. iPlayer, Sounds, News, Weather, Sport and Bitesize each got a colour and an icon built from three shapes: a pink play triangle for iPlayer, orange rising bars for Sounds, violet books on a shelf for Bitesize, blue rain-like blocks for Weather.

The BBC said the push came from audience research describing some services as old fashioned and out of date, and chief customer officer Kerris Bright described the aim as joining the dots between the different bits of the BBC. The work was done by the BBC's in-house teams with Wolff Olins, a credit reported by both Design Week and Transform.

Cost became the story, with critics arguing the logo barely looked different. Business Matters later reported the full modernisation, of which the Reith logo was one part, cost about £7.26 million. The National headlined the launch a backlash.

The reception was rougher than the BBC hoped. The National reported a wave of criticism from rivals and viewers: W1A's Hugh Bonneville joked about a pitch from the show's fictional agency, one viewer asked how many millions of licence-fee pounds had bought a logo that looked the same to anyone but a graphic artist, and Richard Madeley on Good Morning Britain wondered aloud whether anyone in the room had warned that people would laugh. The BBC's answer was coherence. Chief customer officer Kerris Bright said the corporation would join the dots between its services with simplified layouts and graphics, introduced gradually, so that iPlayer, Sounds, TV and the news app would feel unmistakably BBC.

Readers were harsh, with Design Week's comment thread full of licence-fee anger and comparisons to Channel 4's block idents. The master logo is a clear improvement. The service icons are the weak link: if each needs a label to decode, the system is doing less work than it claims.

In short: A better master mark, let down by a family of icons that need captions.

## Sources

- https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/articles/2021/modernising-audience-experience/
- https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-october-2021/bbc-logos-update/
- https://www.newscaststudio.com/2021/10/21/bbc-rebranding-2021/

## Cite this

Rebrand Log, "BBC new logo (2021)", https://rebrandlog.com/rebrand/bbc-2021/, last updated 2026-10-20.