Miscellaneous Notes on ESPN’s New Graphics

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The death of ESPN2 continues. At least on the SD feed, even the BottomLine is marked as simply “ESPN”. About the only indication that this channel is not ESPN is when programs are promoted as being on ESPN2.

A bit odd seeing the new BottomLine alongside the old graphics on Mike and Mike and First Take on ESPN2. Apparently the new graphics will be starting out on SportsCenter only, and ESPN will effectively have three graphics packages: one for SportsCenter, one for games, and one for other studio shows. (I haven’t seen any studio shows since First Take, though.)

Funny story on the BottomLine. The old BottomLine was changed shortly after its introduction, at least in SD; apparently the first version wasn’t legible enough. For that reason, whenever changing to a new topic, such as from “NFL” to “GOLF”, the BottomLine would show a scroll of four sports – with each pair of sports separated by space enough for another sport.

The new BottomLine is actually designed for the font size it’s using, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem, if at all, compared to the old version – except they found space for a larger, less scrunched font for the sport identifier, and now the sport-switch graphic shows six or so sports. It’s also less utilitarian and square, but it’s not really obvious that it’s a parallelogram.

Though I liked when the old BottomLine would shrink the size of the score in order to show stats, and it looks like that’s not happening anymore…

Here’s the funny part: I only saw the morning SportsCenter with its PTI-style rundown, but I suspect the new main graphics for SportsCenter will attract its own concerns of having too small a font size!

Two out of three ain’t bad.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized dream motivations.)

We’ve been on a trek across history over the past week or so, and either the recreation of the universe has resulted in changing history, or more likely, we’re restarting all the themes at the effective beginning of their respective stories.

(Wouldn’t it be funny if the last comic was the same as the first one? Spoilered out to avoid giving David Morgan-Mar any ideas, not that I would object to seeing it if he already came up with the idea.)

But there appears to be an added side effect of the ongoing Irregular Crisis. It appears that Morgan-Mar has now introduced a new “Scientific Revolution” theme.

And this new theme not only includes Ishmael’s encounter with Isaac Newton in the afterlife, but also the encounter the Pirates had with Lewis Carroll. (Which appears to have a bug: the former strip skips the latter when you click on the new theme’s “Next” button.)

Despite the fact that Carroll lived in the 19th century and Newton in the 17th.

It’s apparent that Morgan-Mar has a lot of plans for this theme.

But just enough about it is off-putting to me that it may accelerate my departure from IWC, especially if it becomes clear quickly just what we’re doing, which could come as soon as any theme’s second strip, especially the new one’s.

Not a good day.

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I was all set to have a mostly April Fool’s-free day. I would be spending most of my time preparing for the next epic Sandsday series. I wouldn’t get tripped up by anything today, that’s for damn sure.

Well, I’ve been dodging April Fool’s jokes left and right on the Internet, while getting bogged down in writer’s block and distractions for the series and fighting off a headache. (Right now I have two strips written and they’re probably going to get the hatchet treatment.) And I have an assignment I need to get done for tomorrow… and last night I got around to coming up for an idea for the OOTS post that doesn’t rely on following the current strips but which is going to take quite a bit of doing… and I still need to look for a job… and I’m already getting a head start on falling behind on the textbook…

Maybe I can make some incremental progress on the series while waiting to see the new OOTS strip…

You know this isn’t an April Fool’s joke because it’s an update on a previous post.

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Honestly, I wasn’t planning to have more than the Random Internet Discovery today…

So Awful Announcing has an early look at the new SportsCenter graphics and intro and… it’s basically a modified version of the ESPNEWS graphics. The new intro looks rather spiffy though:

SportsCenter Opening Animation from ESPN Communications on Vimeo.

Neither AA nor ESPN’s press site has “regular” graphics for talking heads and the like, but you really have to see the graphics up close to appreciate them. There’s actually a slight parallelogram look to the Bottom Line, and some sort of beveling effect going on down there as well.

Still intend to get up early on Monday to see it in action.

Before, I might have thought V could stretch the splice into the next book. Now? Not so much.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized terms of lease.)

I’m going to try and be quick with this.

Because it was a makeup for arguably not having a February OOTS post, I don’t consider the post I made when V took this deal to be an official OOTS post for most purposes.

That means I still owe you a March OOTS post, and that will probably come when the next strip does.

But I do want to give a cautionary tale to Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere, regarding the previous strip, which I don’t think Rich thought through.

OOTS doesn’t accompany its strips with posting dates, which means later archive bingers won’t realize the connection to March. More to the point, now and in the future, non-Americans won’t get the joke at all. And it doesn’t help that, legibility reasons or no, the Arizona State Sun Devil is misidentified as simply “Arizona”.

The moral: Use topical strips with caution.

That is all.

Okay, I have to check this out.

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Sometime next week, you’re going to get a sports TV graphics roundup and review.

Because SportsCenter is overhauling its graphics package.

I may wake up slightly before 6 AM on Monday just to see it debut. I wonder if this is a sign that SportsCenter and other ESPN programs are (finally) moving to the graphics package that has populated ESPN’s actual sporting events since the debut of MNF on ESPN (and been ubiquitous on them since April 2007)?

Or… is it an entirely new graphics package, and I need to watch baseball’s Opening Night the previous night to see if it makes its “real” debut there?