When BuzzFeed News was beginning a big redesign, Dennis Huynh and Ben King brought me in to draw a completely new logo. We spent a lot of time talking about what BFN was, what their tone of voice was, what they felt like their journalistic role was and stuff like that. I love talking to clients about these big picture ideas before I start drawing because it points me in directions that I wouldn’t come up with if I immediately started sketching. In this case, the gist was that they were journalists in the traditional model, but their relative newness allowed them to take chances and tell stories in unexpected ways. That pointed me in the direction of combining disparate, energetic individual shapes into an overall traditional editorial logo form. So… Serif. Unusual. Got it. I presented them with these rough sketches to get the visualization process started.
Each of these was a riff on classic “news” headline styles with modern interpretations of details like serifs and curves. I wanted it to look traditional at first glance, but unusual and a bit digital on closer inspection. They immediately were drawn to one of the options and asked me to explore weight variations.
It was around this time that I made the decision that everything would need to revolve around the zz combination. The letter z has an odd shape and z + z creates an even stranger pattern. There’s no way around this. I tried everything I could think of. These are some thumbnails that I presented with the label “Failed ZZ Experiments.”
While Dennis and Ben were looking at the weights, I did some thinking about these experiments. I decided to try the old “If you can’t hide it, put a spotlight on it.” design strategy and started drawing ///// patterns and then reverse-engineered z shapes out of the lines. As I was tinkering with this, Ben came up with the idea of replacing the bottom serif in the N with a dot. My sketches had a “normal” N shape and the overall mark wasn’t iconic enough. Ben’s idea was the perfect solution to this problem.
I drew a new sketch using my zz idea and Ben’s dot. The z shape became more aggressive as I leaned into the pattern. The rest of the shapes were designed to complement and oppose the stark result. The e is round and traditional. The w echoes the zz pattern, but in the opposite direction. The F has big serifs because big serifs look cool. The s is off at the end doing its own thing. Each shape is tightly wound around the shapes around it. The whole things is a carefully composed cacophony.
The team at BFN was happy with this, but they wanted me to make it feel slightly more traditional in the u, e and d. I gave them size variations for the logotype and social media icon.
RIP BFN.