Rebranding & Design System Design for a New Media Startup

In early 2023, we joined forces with Envica to relaunch the media company’s visual identity & platform.Our work involved:• Brand strategy• Logo design• Design system creation• UX/UI design

The Client

Envica delivers bite-sized news to thousands of Gen-Z and millennial readers in Argentina, with an audience of over 100k Instagram followers and partnerships with top brands.

According to Francisco P, the company’s creative lead:

“Envica is a digital media company that focuses on providing quality information and entertainment to young people, offering diverse and unique content. Our goal is to connect people with information effectively, while maintaining quality and diversity across different formats and platforms.”

The Challenge

In early 2023, Envica was outgrowing its brand. Their logo failed to represent them or distinguish them among similar companies. Additionally, it wasn’t scalable or consistent, “falling apart” across applications.

On the other hand, the company’s design system was exceedingly strict and limited, which caused severe inconsistencies. Every day, the creative team had a terrible choice, they could either produce inaccessible assets and stick to the brand, or continue diluting their identity for readability’s sake.

Our Goals

Unlike conventional news outlets, Envica doesn’t run long-form articles. News are delivered in short form, via Instagram stories, where users can enjoy a seamless stream of headlines and highlights.

This content is curated by hand, but reproduced in a semi-automated way. This technological edge empowers Envica to deliver the news consistently and at speed.

With those factors in mind:

• Each news category needed a signature color and icon, so users could understand the focus of each story at first sight.
• The Stories themselves had to be standardized to accommodate Envica’s modern, semi-automated content curation process.  So, our target was somewhere between simplicity, freshness, and iterability.
• The new brand had to strike a balance between simplicity, freshness, and iterability.

Additionally, Envica found this redesign as an opportunity to start conceiving a highly customizable, owned news platform.

The Process

The project took approximately two months.

First, we worked with the Envica team to set the foundation for their design system.

The brand’s visual language is playful and similar to that of consumer tech companies. There are two reasons why we chose this route, rather than the somber aesthetics that characterize news media companies:

• Envica’s ethos as a digital native brand
• The preferences of its GenZ audience

Then, we moved on to the logo. We delivered several options, and iterated them, guided by the client’s feedback:

“We highlight the good predisposition to feedback and the warmth with which you received it”, Francisco says, “and all within the agreed deadlines, which was a very important aspect for us.”

Finally, we developed a system that the Envica team could use to build and display custom but brand-compliant Stories across platforms. The process was smooth and relied on constant communication between Envica’s creative team and Postdigitalist’s designers.

According to Francisco:

“We were fascinated by the level of craftsmanship, precision, and detail from the first deliverable. The proposals look premium, modern, and are strongly linked to the digital world.”

Lastly, we dove further into Envica’s commercial and branding goals. And, guided by those insights, we proposed an interface for the proprietary news platform.

Results

Envica’s current image is cleaner and more scalable than it ever was. And its new design system significantly accelerated the news crafting, delivery, and distribution process.According to Francisco:

“The quality of Postdigitalist’s work is simply superior to that of other agencies we worked with in the past. You fulfilled our goals perfectly. You even challenged us with new ideas and proposals that benefited both the brand and the business.”