The Hechinger Report
Creating a responsive, modern brand identity and website a premier news magazine, covering innovation and inequality in education
⬍ Scrollable: Hechinger Report homepage design
A bold new identity to match the quality of Hechinger's journalism
During my time at Upstatement, I had the pleasure to working with some wonderful clients, like The Hechinger Report.
The Hechinger Report is a nonprofit newsroom covering issues of inequality and innovation in education. The quality of Hechinger’s journalism is top-notch. However their site wasn’t conveying the quality of their work.
During our initial client meeting, a member of the Hechinger staff jokingly described themseleves as looking like a 1990s Pontiac, rather than a quality journalistis endeavor.
Goals of the project
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Design an identity and responsive website that reflects the quality and distince voice of Hechinger’s content.
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Help people understand who Hechinger is and what it does.
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Lay the foundation for The Hechinger Reprot to become a destination new site.
The Hechinger Report was due for more modernized brand identity to match the quality of their journalism.
Bold design, considering constraints
The design vision needed to account for the realities of a small non-profit organization creating quality journalism on a daily basis, including:
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Good photography is inconsistently available.
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Small staff, not a lot of time to actively manage the site on a daily basis.
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No full-time design staff
The site design leaned into nuanced usage of typography and integrated with Wordpress to make site updating and maintenance realistic, considering resources.
Hechinger's headlines were descriptive. The featured homepage slot needed short, impactful headlines to draw readers in. We took a number of existing headlines and rewrote them to demonstrate how to make them work on the new homepage
Experimenting with storytelling ideas
Hechinger dives deep into a number of specialized topics, like Common Core.
In addition to creating a flexible special topic landing page, we also experimented with an idea we called The Primer. The idea of The Primer was to give Hechinger another storytelling tool to introduce complex education topics in a digestable and consumable way. This concept was a value add idea we worked through once we the core of the new site was built.
⬍ Scrollable: Primer page concept