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Arianna Huffington founded the site in 2005, sold it to AOL for 315 million dollars in 2011 and left in 2016. By April 2017 it was owned by Verizon, run by new CEO Jared Grusd and editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen, formerly of The New York Times, who wanted to reach a broader audience. On 25 April it launched its biggest redesign and first rebrand in 12 years, and shortened its name to HuffPost.

The identity was designed with the New York firm Work-Order. The thin serif logo was replaced by a bold, italic, capitalised sans, the typeface National, chosen by the team as strong and a little quirky. Two slashes bracket the name: head of product Julia Beizer said they symbolise moving forward and nod to the slashes in URLs, a tribute to HuffPost's history as the first digital-native news brand at scale. Pushed together, the slashes form the app and social icon, which reads as a road, a slash or an abstract H. The signature green was brightened towards neon mint. In use, the slashes bookend headlines and act as an ident in video.

The homepage kept its famous splash headline, now bigger, and splash cards were designed to carry it onto Facebook and Twitter. All 17 international editions took the new logo, with full redesigns to follow.

Creative Bloq gathered mixed reactions. Brand Union's Sam Becker said the slanted type pushed the brand into tabloid territory but praised a system built from the ground up for digital; others on Twitter found the teal bookends awkward.

Mashable placed the rename in the aftermath of Arianna Huffington's exit eight months earlier. Editor in chief Lydia Polgreen wanted to keep and expand the site's signature splash, while the redesign cleaned up the top of a homepage that had once imitated newspapers. Head of product Julia Beizer described the brand as a way to take the voice users already recognised off platform. Dropping the founder's name from the masthead was the real statement; the new letters only had to carry it.

The tabloid reading is the point and it works. HuffPost's voice was always the shouty splash, and the identity finally looks like it. The URL slash story is a stretch, but the collapsed icon is genuinely clever and the bold italic is unmistakable in a feed.