The Verge (2022)Copied

The Verge launched in 2011 and redesigned in 2016 around a system built to travel across other people's platforms, with hot pink pull quotes and laser lines that made its articles recognisable on social feeds. By 2022 editor-in-chief Nilay Patel had concluded that strategy only went so far. He told Axios the real competition was not Wired but Twitter, and told Nieman Lab his first note to the designers in 2020 was simple: we just want to be able to tweet onto our own website.

The answer, unveiled on 13 September 2022 with publisher Helen Havlak, was the Storystream: a homepage feed of short posts, links to other outlets, embeds from TikTok and Reddit, and full articles. Patel called it the biggest reinvention since launch, and it was the first Vox Media site on the new Duet platform.

The identity was made in-house. Ian Adelman led the logo with Marcus Peabody, Verge creative director Will Joel and Vox Media Design. Parts of its letters are visible and others hidden, which Patel described as an unfinished interface between present and future, meant to come alive in motion. The team deliberately avoided techie fonts: Poly Sans from Gradient, with its rounded ink traps, for headlines; FK Roman, a modern Times, for body copy; and Klim's condensed Manuka for features. The palette got names like Blurple, Pernod and Hot Brick.

Nieman Lab noted the most consequential change was the feed, not the fonts, and that readers reach the Storystream on article pages only after a gauntlet of ads.

Nieman Lab caught the practical frustration underneath the design. The editor in chief said the barrier to appearing on the site's own homepage had been a 500 word article, too high for editors busy with podcasts and video, so they ended up posting on Twitter instead. One of the first prototypes of the new feed was made by blogging into a Google Doc for an afternoon. The Storystream now mixes full articles with quick posts and links out to other news organisations and press releases. The identity is loud, but the real redesign is that lowered barrier.

It is one of the boldest media identities of its decade. The cropped logo risks illegibility, but it is distinctive, and pairing an aggressive, playful design with a return to blogging felt coherent. The only real weakness is that the brand often shouts louder than the journalism it is meant to frame.