If you’re an American with any perception of design at all and you’ve watched any television in Europe or perhaps Australia or New Zealand, specifically television news, it doesn’t take you very long to notice that the vast majority of these international programs eschew three-dimensional, flashy graphics and sound effects; instead, international productions seem to opt for a cleaner, more minimal style of graphics that strongly bring to mind the Swiss International style.

To get an idea of how ridiculously excessive and gaudily ornamented and animated American cable news has become, one needs to look no further than the Fox News Channel, the most popular cable news channel in the United States. This video is a quick look at some of the recently redesigned graphics from the late afternoon news program Studio B.

There’s virtually no consistency here aside from a vaguely ’50s diner-meets-Star Trek gold-and-purple color scheme with plenty of 3D-just-because-we-can-do-it elements. The fonts alone are a mess–in this short clip, I spotted Bank Gothic, something that looks like a bold, condensed version of Eurostile, Gill Sans, Helvetica Condensed, squashed Helvetica Condensed (check out the “2003″ in the corner of the file video during the Pat Tillman story), and whatever that geometric brush face is that they’re using for the “Studio B” title & logo.

The opening of the show has really no consistency or connection to the overall Fox News Channel brand–aside from the omnipresent FNC “tower” logo rotating in the lower left-hand corner, every show’s opening looks drastically different.

Now take a look at this opening from Sky News Sunrise, a morning program on the British satellite network Sky News³³.

There are huge differences between the two–not only does the Sky broadcast start with an extremely well-done, cinematic sweep through the newsroom that conveys energy and expertise³³, but the graphics are minimal and unobtrusive. Everything stays inside the Helvetica Neue family (save for the word “Sky” in the logo, but obviously that can be forgiven), and the general rule for their graphics seems to be “less is more”–which is largely the hallmark of the Swiss International style. By cutting back on lower-thirds and extraneous on-screen graphics, as much attention as possible is given to video–which is the obvious advantage that television news has over print media.

Even the Sky set is carefully designed–the huge, gorgeous curving screen in the background is a great place to show larger-than-life images from the field or guests via satellite, once again making video the centerpiece. Compare it with the Studio B set, which reflects FNC’s busy graphical sensibility but really does nothing to highlight news video.

As for the question of branding, Sky, like the BBC and many other foreign networks, doesn’t differentiate much across its program offerings; each show gets its own version of the Sky News logo and a slightly different opening sequence, but nothing that deviates from the network’s style guide. (Take a look at this video for a few various examples.) This is not the case in the USA; aside from a consistent news crawl³³ and Chyron setup, FNC and CNN’s shows all look quite different. MSNBC is something of an exception, as they’ve recently started using a consistent angular style that approaches the European conventions of minimalism–but only in the most superficial sense, as they still opt to have a visible lower third virtually all the time.

I can’t help but connect this to a recent piece from the New York Times that discusses the recent trend in making packaging more eye-catching and “busy;” the article illustrates the phenomenon with a photograph of five different label designs for what I think is Mountain Dew, but the brand is so obscured as to become almost irrelevant. Obviously a company should carefully monitor its brands to make sure that they are still being marketed appropriately, but I think perhaps we should look to Coca-Cola for an example–after all, they just wiped the slate clean, so to speak, by clearing their cans of clutter and extraneous ornamentation, and the difference is quite striking.

Are we pandering to the perception that Americans have problems with paying attention? Or is this just a case of giving in to the stereotypical American demand that “more is more,” rather than respecting the designer’s credo of “less is more?” I hate to think that the era of excess that we live in translates to our collective sense of style, but I can’t help but be suspicious.3

1. From what I understand, Sky News may have recently redesigned the graphics–I’ve seen some of the newer stuff, and while it’s slightly different, it’s still quite minimal and doesn’t stray far from this video.333
2. I’d never seen anything like the opening newsroom sweep done for a news program, but it’s quite striking and may be perhaps my favorite part of the entire sequence.333
3. Even this isn’t always the case–FNC has inexplicably removed the news ticker from the screen during Studio B.333

3