Client
SOCIETY (Fictitious)
Category
Branding, Editorial
Delivered
November 2021
Background
SOCIETY was born during the 2020 quarantine as an alternative media project covering politics, climate, culture, and science topics. The founders’ goal was to build up a media outlet with a particular focus on honesty and transparency, yet wrapping these values on an authoritative perspective. In times of uncertainty and with political events and global issues triggering people’s disbelief in the media, SOCIETY strives to create a community for the people, by the people. SOCIETY wants to be perceived as human, imperfect, and uneven. Still, they want to be a trusted and well-respected publication that enchants their audience with quality journalism.
The challenge
This case’s challenge is to design a brand identity and a first visual framework anchored in the following dimensions of the brand:
- Emotional connection with the audience. How can a visual concept tell people SOCIETY is the media they deserve?
- Brand awareness. How can the brand’s visual concept represent the core foundational values?
- Differentiation. How is SOCIETY different from other media?
- Accessibility. Is it convenient for the audience?
- Value proposition. Is the result a valuable product?
Visual identity
The visual identity of SOCIETY presents a high-contrast serifed word mark. With a pleasant old fashioned elegance derived from earlier centuries, it is perceived as reliable and serious. However, the letter “O” has been skewed to give the brand a playful dynamism, as an effort to represent its core values (human, imperfect, uneven).
Editorial visual framework
SOCIETY has a very powerful and authoritative visual style on the digital publication. As the visual identity of the brand, SOCIETY incorporates a robust and traditional editorial style serif typeface “Frank Ruhl Libre”. However, in order to deliver a more playful and contemporary tone, the corner radius of some molecules is eased, and some geometric shapes of the design are altered to reach imperfection. The subtle usage of the colors for the sections, and the clean geometric font “Sora” combined with the main font create a more welcoming and modern digital environment.
