Recount Media

The Recount Explainer Video

Context

Develop the brand identity for The Recount—a daring, modern, video-first perspective on political journalism.

Strategy

Help the brand stand out with a no-bullshit positioning, savvy strategy, and eye-catching visuals that empower journalists and media makers to speak truth to power in high-impact, short-form videos.

Solution

A modular system of title cards, infographics, and video treatments allows The Recount to capably distill the deluge of political content, beginning with the 2019 Democratic debates.

Creative Strategy

In an age of disinformation and alternative facts, it’s more important than ever for media brands to reveal and recount the truth.

Working with The Recount’s team of journalists and media experts, we helped position the brand as a go-to platform for people to see what’s happening in politics right now — without wasting their time, insulting their intelligence, or burying them in bullshit.

The goal was to help the brand stand apart from the chaos of the current media landscape with a visible devotion to high-quality journalism. We also wanted to help the brand redefine what news can be in the industry’s ongoing shift from cable to non-linear video.

Design System

The Recount’s design system is clear and recognizable — it puts the facts front and center.

The digital user experience loosely inspired The Recounts brand identity, leveraging the backslash in the logo as a central visual metaphor in our design. The shape acts in various ways— highlighting information, motivating transitions—giving the viewer a sense of active involvement with the platform, as if they’re digging deeper into hierarchies of digital information.

Meanwhile, our striking color palette for the brand leans away from the reds and blues of most political video coverage for something a little more nuanced and eye-catching.

Brand Launch

A flexible graphic framework further empowers the brand's creative team to speak truth to power in every context.

We helped set the stage for The Recount’s launch on the eve of the 2019 Democratic debates with a flexible style guide filled with logos, infographics, title cards, maps, video treatments, and more.

As with all digital media platforms, we had to make sure the system was elastic enough to accommodate not only the master brand but the nearly non-stop flow of content, events, and future franchises the brand plans to create in the future.