Brand & identity
A ground-up brand system — logo, color, type, and voice
The brand came first. Before the site redesign, The Standard needed an identity with a point of view — one that could feel established and trustworthy while still reading as the bold, independent newcomer it was. We built it around a single archetype, The Rebel, and a system disciplined enough to scale from a product screen to a press badge.
Context
A new newsroom earns trust through consistency. The brand had to hold together across a fast-growing team and a sprawling surface area — web, social, video, events, and print — without losing its edge or slowing anyone down.
Approach
The identity centers on a constructed wordmark and a square "S" icon, drawn on a tight grid with defined spacing and lockups for black, white, and the Highlighter yellow.
The palette is deliberately spare — Whiteout, Ink, and a signature Highlighter yellow — with a grayscale ramp for hierarchy, while Libre Caslon carries the editorial voice across headlines and body.
On top of those building blocks, a set of expressions gives the brand its texture — a pixelation artifact for highlighting, torn-paper edges, and gritty photographic textures used across illustrations and event graphics.
The system was built to travel. It held its voice from business cards to a press kit to direct mail — the same confident type, the same yellow, wherever readers met it.
Outcome
A brand that felt established on day one and stayed recognizable everywhere it showed up — the foundation the award-winning website was built on.