Making Gen Z more informed with a stand-out media brand

Brand Design, Brand Strategy, UX / UI Design, Mobile App

The Juice wanted to create a news educational product for high schools with a design-forward brand that spoke to Gen Z and educators at the same time. Through a multi-phase process, I developed a brand that was smart, relatable, and trustworthy, and could be translated across mediums. Then, I designed the user interface for the product itself, given the new brand. Here's how.

Step 1: Researching the Market

The first task was to get an understanding of what brands the end consumer, the student, was used to getting her news from: mostly social feeds. (Nowadays, this would be entirely TikTok, but at the time, outlets like Now This and Thrillist were still owning social feeds.) I also took a look at the edtech market to understand what teachers were familiar with seeing: lots of outdated designs and boring brands.

Step 2: Exploring Options

Using these research insights, I created three creative directions in which we could take the brand. The first direction emphasized the idea of "highlighting" important stories and literalized that into the design. The second appealed more to the grape juice connotations of the name, although it was farther from school-setting associations. And the third played up the modern, bold aspects of the brand personality in a minimalist design. We settled on a cross between 1 and 2, pairing the concepts of note "highlighting" with the playfulness of social media.

Step 3: Fleshing Out the Brand

I then iterated on the direction we chose, producing a fully-fledged brand bridging the gap between digital-first entertainment media and traditional news. This translated into bold color pairings, unique fonts, and alternative messaging. The complementary palette is based on highlighters commonly found in school settings. Additionally, it closely resembles the CMYK breakdown of colors, which are used by traditional printers, in homage to journalism as a print media.

The Juice’s photography will span many subjects and scenes, but it should consistently exhibit depth, high contrast, bright colors, and a human focus. When possible, subject matter should focus on the street for an on-the-ground perspective. Photo edits (below) can use a CMYK split to pull out the Juice complementary palette for a pop art look.

The Juice leans into the idea of the printed word: typography is a large element of graphic design. Annotation typically seen in the English classroom takes on a new life, adding movement and color to an otherwise “black and white”, unbiased editorial style. These custom emoticons are designed to be a recognizable element across many different interfaces and help guide users on the app experience.

These emoticons are designed to be a recognizable element across many different interfaces and help guide users on the app experience.

UI & Product Design

Using the new brand elements, I designed a newsletter MVP product to send to educators and students & style guidelines for The Juice team.

I applied my brand system to UI screens with standard flows as a template for subsequent designers. This allowed us to execute a seamless hand-off to The Juice's internal designers, who went on to produce final wireframes for the app product.

Result

A revolutionary edtech product & brand that has the power to shape young Americans' understanding of media and current events. The Juice stands out in the education landscape as vibrant, fresh, and legitimately interesting.
‍

Making Gen Z more informed with a stand-out media brand

Work

Want to work together?