VICE Re-Brand
About VICE
Vice Media is a company focused on news, magazine, art, film production, publishing imprint and record label. Vice media became popular among the millenials, the demographic cohort following Generation X (born in the 1980s-2000s). It has claimed so due to its mastery of “immersionist” style of journalism which is an antithesis to the contemporary style of journalism seen in-use by popular news agencies such as CNN. Vice.com, the flagship website of the media group and also the central point of convergence of all its related site; bear the below Vice logo/identity.
Research
I started by understanding the client and what the client wants to convey, conveys and what image of the brand was percieved by its audience. VICE has been around since over a decade now and has already estabished a prominent image. Hence, I started out with understanding the audience demographic better so as to be able to tailor a balance of what VICE wants to look like and should look like. The primary audience are people who are 18-34 year old, educated and technology savvy. Some key points are that the audience is 64% male and 36% female. A stark 74% have attended college and almost 84% of the audience are from USA. Their strong partnership with social media companies like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter reflects in their strong presence in the mentioned three sites with over 500 million video views per month along with an average of 20 minutes plus of content consumption session.
VICE is perceived as a young media company which is raw in its approach to reporting, is driven by the motive of revealing the real story of situations and understands how the youth want to be communicated. There are many competitors who are trying to put on a similar personality and are doing pretty brave and forward thinking journalism however VICE has an edge with its immersive journalism along with the fact that its articles and reports present a very different angle of the story. Following are a few competitors to name a few are Yahoo, Guardian, HuffingtonPost, BuzzFeed, Reuters.
Brand Goals
The comprehensive research boils down to a few distinct goals that a re-designed VICE brand would want to communicate. They are
1. Youthful, Brash, Uncouth and Contemporary
2. Pure Immersive Journalism, unaltered
3. Fast and Reliable News Source
Brainstorming
After having all the research done and undestanding where to go from the brand goals, I took it to a digital whiteboard to let my ideas loose and explore the farthest of creative ideas to come up with a brand identitiy or logo. I was looking for logo ideas that could signify synonymity to the brand goals and could deliver it in a very brief succinct manner.
Studio
The brainstorm produced some very wild ideas and even some conservative ones. However, I learnt that the existing logo design really conveys what VICE wanted to, yet it needed a serious facelift to accomodate all of its goals and to fast forward to a more contemporary design so as to stay relevant further in time.
Various versions of identity design were made in-studio. They were critqued thoroughly by a class or artists and instructors several times twice a week over a period of a whole semester. They lead to several iterations and refinement of the design.
The Design
The new design is based on the XXII URBAN CUTOUTS typeface by Doubletwo Studios. This typeface was chosen as it was proportionately as youthfull and as it speaks uncouth 'subculture'. With its sharp edges and bold steep lines it speaks of gallant journalism and pain their journalists take to uncover and present an unadulterated report. With clean and limited whitespaces it illustrates a no tolerance to distraction and zero affordance to content not related to their genre of business. It is contemporary in its style yet illustrating a balance of mature and brash.
Brand Collaterals
The brand identity was taken for a spin on some of the places where the logo is most likely to appear, such as business cards, letterheads and envelope.
