The BBC’s newish corporate typeface Reith is being slowly bedded in across the corporation’s many platforms. Designed by the foundry Dalton Maag with wide user consultation inside the BBC, it made its first appearance during 2018. The early spring of 2019 saw the typeface’s arrival on online sports pages and in the summer it began to be used for on-screen graphics (see above; go to this article for several more screenshots). The serif and sans serif blend very nicely in the examples shown.

The ten minute film on the first link above serves as an excellent introduction to the importance of typography in presenting a huge corporation’s image to the world, as well as some delightful detail. I particularly liked the description of how the letter Q was designed. Altering the descender so that it stayed level with the baseline has made it much easier to use in all-caps settings. There is a lovely little piece of animation in the film at about 5.57 mins showing this:

Getting back to real life use, the Reith Sans cap Q can be seen at work in this screenshot from BBC Sport:

Contrast this with the Helvetica Q still being used on the news site:

What is slightly odd is that the news screenshot shows that in fact the descender on a Helvetica cap Q doesn’t extend below the baseline. The same is true in Arial, although it does in other sans serifs such as Gill Sans and Verdana:

So it’s probably a good idea to build a descender-free set of caps to future-proof against some other sans serif turning up in a CSS sub-menu.

As an afterthought I must say that, as a fully paid-up member of the Matthew Carter fan club, I still quite like Verdana. I’m not sure exactly when the BBC stopped using it, but I found this rather charming example on a page created in 2005.