In 2019, Voxmedia was ramping up its Chorus enterprise SaaS business which offered media companies the same publishing tools that power Vox Media’s networks. The Ringer, Funny Or Die, The McElroy Family, The Chicago Sun-Times, Deseret News and REVOLT became partner networks.
The design work required to bring a partner’s site onto Chorus would involve a team of product and brand designers. We approach each site as unique, always focusing on the user experience and with an understanding of our partner’s specified goals for the site. Those goals can vary from driving newsletter subscriptions and increasing video engagement to implementing a new editorial strategy.
Each engagement encompassed brand work, experience design and visual design. In the case of Deseret News, Utah’s longest running newspaper, we collaborated with them in bringing a new identity to life on Chorus.
In existence since 1850, Deseret News, Utah’s longest running newspaper, wanted to preserve aspects of their heritage while expressing a bold modernity fitting for the digital age. Our team collaborated with their internal brand group, BonCom.
For inspiration, BonCom looked to their history. Their Didot (typeface) inspired logo incorporates elements of previous Deseret News nameplates, namely the combination of thick and thin lines and serifs along with the addition of a period, a typical 19th century design convention in newspapers (The Wall Street Journal still uses the period in its nameplate and has done so since 1889). Alongside their word mark Deseret News incorporated a beehive, a holdover from their previous logo and a recognizable symbol of Utah.
From there our team looked for opportunities to expand that brand language onto Chorus. We presented different variations of how we might leverage their style guide to create a wider set of elements to work with including, backgrounds, an expanded color palette and various design accents that could echo the brand language, focusing on the beehive element as the basis of an extended graphic language.
The home page masthead was extended to create an updateable marquee space for topical or thematic photography or illustration to be curated by the Deseret news team in order to give a more magazine-like feel to the publication – another of Deseret News’ stated goals.