Yesterday we relaunched Curbed, our owned and operated brand about interiors, homes, architecture, cities, and property for sale. Not only is it the first of Vox Media's websites to be positioned on a new version of Chorus, our proprietary publishing platform, but we reintroduced the brand with a visual refresh that respects Curbed's 10-year history and simultaneously paving way for the future.
This blog post outlines the step-by-step process our design team took to research, explore, and refine the new brand identity.
Branding questionnaire and competitive analysis
The first step of any redesign process involves knowing the brand's mission and goals. We sent the stakeholders an intensive questionnaire, but these key objectives stood out the most:
- What do you provide for your readers?
- How is Curbed unique?
- What does your audience count on you for?
- Who else is working in the same space and what are they doing?
The answers were researched, reviewed, and discussed in detail with editorial leadership to develop a unified strategy. We talked through the fact that Curbed has expanded its content from real estate news to making connections between larger societal shifts in the built environment, and that we're uniquely positioned to do this because of the scale of our network. It covers the idea of home and place from a variety of scales: individual residences to neighborhoods, cities, and beyond.
Curbed is the website for people who love where they live.
The competitive analysis showed us where the gaps were and informed the ways in which we would find a visual voice that could set Curbed apart. We knew we had to get creative with our palette, given the competitor breakdown shown below. Our type exploration took shape in a similar way; we collected screenshots of treatments and considered how we could build a unique system with scalable hierarchy alongside respective palettes and shapes.
Design Brainstorming and Sketching
We spent a few days filling whiteboards with words that describe the brand, as well as objects or concepts that we thought could convey these descriptions in a visual way. We considered different elements of a structure, like a corner, as being one of many themes to sketch upon.
Our designers sketched in whatever medium they felt comfortable and the result added a lot of tangibility to the process. They took walks around their neighborhood, sketched found buildings and elements, and used different materials to communicate texture, pattern, perspective, and color. Some of the explorations were very loose while others considered on-platform structures such as pull quotes and image overlays.
4. Refined sketches
We began to create visual libraries to represent the brand holistically—early executions that would show how Curbed could appear on and off platform and out in the physical world. Typography, color, and shape were combined into several loose systems that we could begin to discuss and critique with more context and substantiation. In the past we might have made a website comp and later derived design elements from it for use elsewhere. This time we tried to find the anchors of the visual identity first, so that everything that followed would support a greater whole.
Two directions
After several rounds of revision and feedback from the team, we discussed what was working in our explorations, what wasn't, and why. Design systems were narrowed down to two distinct approaches: Flux and Vista.
Flux
This direction represents the constant evolution of homes and neighborhoods by using time as an implied visual. A juxtaposition of thick and thin lines suggest incompletion and movement. The typography is strong but elegant, clean but distinct. The rich color palette is inspired by interior and exterior elements.
Vista
Intersections between tantalizing fields of color are used to suggest familiar spaces, large and small. A combination of lively and subdued hues created shifts in perceived dimension, while a weighty slab serif provides stability.
Logo
After Curbed's new visual structure began taking shape and was well on its way to completion, we began working with several designers on a logo that would meet all of the goals it was set to achieve.
It made sense to us that while we updated Curbed's visual identity, we would reintroduce the mark that people had recognized since its inception. The original logo had been around for about ten years and hadn't evolved with the brand's growing voice. It represented real estate, but the Curbed community has continuously cultivated a more expansive range of content since its inception. Curbed is about the entire lifecycle of homes; Curbed is about loving where you live. Our new editorial strategy lent itself to exploring new ways to represent the brand and amplify its growth.
Cory Schmitz, Curbed's logo designer, said:
The main goal for me was to preserve the essence of the old logo, but modernize it to compliment the other Vox Media logos. The building shape and the condensed font were memorable elements from the old logo, so I wanted to preserve that for the rebrand. Additionally, after I read the brief, I really liked the idea of using clear, simple black & white magazine layouts like for inspiration, so that was a focus on all the logo concepts I worked on.
Cory, who previously designed logos for Eater and Polygon, created a full logo and complementary logomark that work together as a flexible system for many use cases. His invaluable work does a wonderful job of paying homage to Curbed's history and complimenting the elements of the new design system.
Apply everything to the Chorus design framework
Curbed was our first site to launch on our new, unified version of Chorus. The old model for launching a brand was about building a website, sometimes from scratch. When we launched on Chorus, we were able to focus our efforts on designing the overall visual system that would a highly-individualized brand to be created and operated on a platform. Our process was about expressing an extensive language on a solid framework through customization.
Additionally, we focused on creating reusable components that support a wide range of content types. This includes variations in layout and opportunities to be expressive with typography, shape, and color. Along the way, we were able to evaluate what was missing in the core platform's design system and configuration variables accordingly.
One of the greatest advantages of the platform-focused approach to the design system was that our brand designers were able to directly dive into the Chorus design configuration tool and make decisions without needing to file an issue for engineers for each little tweak. This saved our team a lot of time and effort, but we were still able to work closely as a team to solve larger issues together.
Ship it!
This was a brand-new process for many of us. While launching sites on Chorus makes the launches more efficient, we have a lot left to learn as we continue to add brands onto the platform. We're very excited to let Curbed out into the wild and see its audience and editorial strategy continue to grow. And we're ever-grateful for the amazing, super-talented Curbed editorial leadership team who shaped this design as much as we did!
For more details on the launch, check out the editor's note and don't miss out on our new set of emojis!