He who pays the Piper should demand a new logo

With ITV reducing its commitments to regional broadcasting, the BBC has been taking up some of the slack. A manifestation of this is Late Kick Off, a football show that began last night on BBC1. The version we get in the east is produced by Kevin Piper, who presented Anglia Tonight and Anglia's various football shows for aeons before the retrenchment. Not giving a toss about football, I can't say whether the show's any good or not, but I'm glad that Piper, who always seemed likeable on-screen, is keeping busy.

However, with my doctorate in blue cardboard and Letraset studies from the Border TV Academy of Graphic Design, I am qualified to pass comment on his company logo, which, sad to say, is not of the same quality as the Anglia silver knight. While it's nice to see something on the BBC free of the tyranny of Gill Sans (which I once loved with a passion, but now regard with the contempt that familiarity breeds - meanwhile, the Richard Levin-designed 1958-1997 BBC logo will always be my favourite piece of corporate design, in all its variant forms), the design for Kevin Piper Media (I can't decide whether I like or loathe the Ronseal naming policy - He could have had something far cleverer with a name like his) looks like something a bored sixth-former might have knocked up on the school's new Mac in 1990 (that being the last time and place when I knowingly used the Avant Garde typeface for anything). If he'd had the company and logo lying dormant for years, it could be forgiven (just about) but a swift gander at the Companies House database shows that Kevin Piper Media Ltd was incorporated on 20 September 2009.

In fairness, the logo isn't all bad. The one saving grace is the colour bars, which are obviously a comment on MonkeyMFC's antics at Millwall Online.